


In the Half-Light of the Canyon

by trainthief



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, And plenty of misunderstandings and repression of course, BotFA Fix-It, Everybody Lives, M/M, Slow Burn, Time Travel Fix-It, With plenty of angst along the way, mixes and matches the canon of the books and movies in whatever way suits me best, the whole gang is here but I couldn't possibly type them all in, written in the style of the books
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 138,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23239603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trainthief/pseuds/trainthief
Summary: After all the terrible business with the ring was said and done, and all the great stories of the affair were finished being told, there was a day when - at an age much older and riper than he frankly would have liked to bother with being - Bilbo passed on to the next realm.Decades before that, and with far too much left unsaid, Thorin Oakenshield had done the same.Now, whether due to the fumblings of Fate or the meddling of the Valar themselves, they each awoke - miles from each other, returned to the start of their quest, and certain they were entirely alone in the matter.
Relationships: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield
Comments: 281
Kudos: 753





	1. Chapter 1

On the day that he died Bilbo Baggins was fifty-three. 

This wasn’t an issue, all things considered. In fact, given that he’d spent far more years being fifty-three than he had trying to reach that number in the first place, he frankly thought of himself as rather lucky. Fifty-three was the prime of life for a hobbit. It was just after all the messy business of finding yourself and growing into your feet was safely behind you, and still before your hair turned white and thinned away, and you lost track of your feet entirely. 

He continued to age on the inside, of course. Or he thought he did, though he could never be sure. There were many drawbacks to having experienced war like none of your kind had for centuries, and therein watching the love of your lonely life slip away through your fingers like a handful of flour from a sack after you’ve only just swept the floor… Many drawbacks indeed, but not the least of them was the way that it aged you, somehow. 

In fact, Bilbo often wondered - on the rare occasion that he questioned his unchanging appearance at all - whether that might have something to do with it. Whether some careless cosmic hand had fumbled for a moment as it wove the tapestry of fate and simply dropped a stitch, sending his soul rocketing to a maturity that would’ve been more recognizable on an elf than anyone of his own species, while his body was left in the dust entirely. But most of the time he chose not to think of it at all, as a mind so finely tempered by grief as his was expert in doing. 

And so it was that Bilbo grew to be eleventy-one while still in his middle age, and – though he could never be sure if it was the unusual youth about him, which the hobbit men all regarded suspiciously and the hobbit women all envied – he found that he had little in common with those who were his actual age, and no interest at all in those who looked it. He would have liked to let that account for the loneliness which had settled down to stay somewhere deep inside him like the familiar chill of a winter that never quite ended, if it weren’t for the fact that he knew in his heart that wasn’t true. He’d had many friends in his life, some of them even quite good. And before he’d left on his little adventure, he would have sworn that he’d already known the best a friendship could give him. But anything that came after it never could quite measure up, no matter how hard he tried to force himself back into the neat little space in the Shire he’d left behind all those months ago. Tea twice a month on a scheduled Sunday wasn’t half as good as weeks on end spent carefully balancing a bowl of stew on his knee as two young dwarves jostled his elbows and raucously sang songs that seemed almost competitively filthy. And as nice as it was to receive an unexpected pie from a neighbor with charitably firm instructions to keep the tin, he found he did not treasure any such gifts half as much as he did the small wooden carving of a bunny that Bofur had pressed in his hands one of the nights they’d stayed at Beorn’s house, with a teasing wink and a quick escape before Bilbo could properly express his annoyance at how the dwarrow wouldn’t let go of the silly nickname. 

And really, when it came down to it, the Shire was full of people with kind hearts and plenty of friendship to give, which should have mended the ache of loss in his heart a bit. But certainly none of them were Thorin, and no one ever could be. 

And so the loss never went away at all. It sat in his stomach like a stone, and dined with him six meals a day, and lay down to bed with him every night on the other side of the bed his parents had once shared, and followed him to every party where he sat at communal tables with family and friends and smiled and laughed as best as he could while his loss held him at a distance. 

Frodo had helped, of course. He was the best of children, so how could he not? When he’d first come to Bilbo, quiet and reserved and so afraid of his grief he didn’t even dare cry, Bilbo had recognized the feeling so entirely it was as if he were looking at his reflection in a deep pond on an impossibly still day. So they’d cried together more than once in the first year, and they’d smiled together much more frequently and easily than that every year since. 

But Frodo had grown, as all other hobbits did – and so too had Bilbo’s loneliness, it seemed. And so - at eleventy-one, and still as fifty-three as ever – he felt at last that he both could go to visit old friends, and that he ought to. None of them were Thorin either, of course, but surely the combination of those that remained might be just what he needed. He could visit Balin and Ori in Moria on his way, as the last letter he’d received from them had been filled with details of their plan to conquer another of their lost dwarven homes. He was sure it would be lovely there already, with those two to brighten the place. He was sure Erebor would be even more beautiful. 

He had put off the journey back to visit his dearest friends long enough, thanks to his reticence to leave his nephew behind. And he’d never said as much, but he had a feeling of certainty in his heart – more so even than the last time he’d left his little hobbit hole for the exact same destination all those years ago – that this would not be a trip he returned from. But nowadays there was no getting past it, the idea that he didn’t know how long he had left. Most hobbits only lasted a century, which was less than most races, more than men, and quite enough for them thank you very much. Only Old Took had made it much past one hundred before Bilbo. And so – though he felt physically capable of taking on another hundred years besides – his greedier relatives had begun to use their invitations to tea to make discreet measurements of his furniture and to place private dibs on his various other odds and ends. And though his first instinct was to smash every piece of china he owned just to damn them and their ill-mannered plans, he instead made arrangements for his nephew to inherit the lot of it, and planned as ungraceful an exit as he could execute. 

He wanted to see mountains again. 

He told as much to Gandalf, when the wizard dropped by for an unexpected visit the very day of his party. And really, he should have known he couldn’t get away with a bit of drama and trickery without the old conjurer catching his scent. Gandalf had seemed surprised, when he’d seen Bilbo, more so even than he’d expected. 

“Bilbo Baggins, you haven’t aged a day” he had said, his tone almost accusing though his smile was as friendly as ever. 

Bilbo had brushed past it, inviting Gandalf in for tea and allowing the wizard to forget the subject entirely in favor of bumping his head on nearly everything in Bag End. For some reason he hadn’t wanted to be questioned about it, though he had no answer to hide. 

And before he knew it their visit for tea had come and gone, and he was out by the old party tree - celebrating his excessive years with more food and drink than was advisable for anyone other than a hobbit, relishing in the smell of the wildflowers as they mingled with the long grass underfoot, and feeling the warm summer breeze that flowed through his shirtsleeves and made the leaves on the trees dance lightly alongside them. He’d even almost enjoyed the unfortunate incident with the firework that young Merry and Pippin had so foolishly instigated. Though the rest of the partygoers had scattered in fright, he hadn’t believed there truly was a dragon in their midst for more than half a second. 

And in that half a second, he’d felt closer to a long dead king than he had in half a century. 

All of it was wonderful, and all of it had only further cemented the idea that at long last it was time for him to depart. 

And so he had, with the kind of long rambling confustication of a speech that would’ve had his dwarves in stitches, and the help of a magic ring. 

A magic ring he hadn’t quite wanted to give up, when it came down to it. 

He had, of course, in the end. But it had been more difficult than he’d thought. It whispered to him, made him half-formed promises that weren’t quite solid enough for him to deny them outright on principle. 

He could come back, you know. 

You could speak to him now, if you like. 

It’s within your power. Everything you want. Bring him back, make him love you. 

He had no idea if the ring had the power to deliver on such suggestions, but he cursed himself for how tempting he found them regardless. He had seen firsthand the life of one who made themselves reliant on the blighted trinket, and even more keenly he remembered the hurt that could be caused by becoming attached to anything so shiny and soulless. And though it took him a moment longer than he wished to admit, the ring had fallen from his hand like a stone - and with it had gone the small sliver of decades-old hope he’d never let himself recognize, for fear that knowing it would oblige him to squash it away for his own sanity. 

And so – feeling almost as if he’d watched Thorin and his nephews die in front of him all over again, and yet somehow inexplicably lighter despite it – Bilbo walked out of Bag End for what would surely be the last time. 

He spent a good long while with the elves, longer than he’d expected. He never made it to Erebor, in the end, much as he’d tried once or twice to sneak out under cover of darkness. He wasn’t a captive there, of course, but somehow he’d aged decades in only the time it had taken for him to get to Rivendell, and it only took the interruption of Elrond with an unimpressed expression on his face to remind him that his aching joints and weak muscles would never bear him over the Misty Mountains the way they once had, and he would not survive the journey. 

Much happened in the space between then and his departure with the elves to Valinor. But that is of course its own story, and one for a different time. Instead, it suffices to say that the events that transpired all aged him more than almost anything before ever had. Physically, of course, by the time he found himself bedridden among the elves and waiting to pass on to the next realm he had aged almost a century in barely a sliver of the time, and he could hardly complain for it, as blessed as he’d been for so long. 

Though he would not be a Baggins if he did not complain a little. 

Spiritually, though, he felt he was stretched quite beyond what he was ever intended for. Ages ago he’d told Gandalf he felt like butter scraped over too much bread, and how he longed for the ease of that weariness now. These days he’d call himself lucky to feel like a single pat of butter spread over a whole loaf, and twice as ridiculous as the concept itself was. The things he had gone through, the things his nephew had gone through… it was all too much for one simple hobbit to bear. And he found that at the end of it all he was perfectly happy to imagine the idea of going to sleep and never waking up again. It had been a lovely life he’d led. Imperfect, of course, but what else could be expected. And there were many things he wished he could have changed, but there was nothing for those wishes now. 

He didn’t know what awaited him, just beyond the gates of mortality. Even Gandalf did not know, and the wizard delighted in knowing a little bit about everything. Secretly, selfishly, he hoped that he might somehow smuggle his way into the halls of Mahal. One final trick from a most unaccomplished burglar. He hoped beyond hope that he’d have some way to see his beloved dwarves again. Some way to speak to them all, even if just for a moment. Some way to let them all know… well, all of it. How much he cared for each of them, first and foremost. But so much more besides.

It was with that hope in his mind, rekindled differently and more purely than it had the last time it had taken up residence there, that he slipped into a comfortable sleep one day in Valinor. He closed his eyes, and never again did they open. 

******* 

Thorin Oakenshield awoke with a gasp and the end of a sentence on his lips. 

He cast his eyes around frantically, curious and a bit frightened at what he might see. The last thing he remembered was his increasing weakness on the battlefield. The death of Azog. The death of his nephews. The tears in the eyes of his burglar as Thorin had begged some final forgiveness. 

There had been so much he’d wanted to say then, for it felt like only moments ago. And though death on the battlefield was among the highest of honors for a dwarf, he had found that when it came to him at last it had only frustrated and saddened him. He hadn’t had the energy to tell Bilbo even a quarter of what he’d have liked. He hadn’t even apologized as thoroughly as he’d wanted. He hadn’t had the strength or skill to raise his hand and wipe away a lone tear as it had run slowly and painfully down his hobbit’s cheek. Oh, how he had wanted to. But he knew he couldn’t control his limbs when he couldn’t feel them, and the idea of approaching the burglar with anything but the gentlest of touches, after everything that had happened between them… He hardly deserved to offer the comfort he wanted to, as in truth the touch would only have served to selfishly comfort himself. 

Instead he’d bid the hobbit farewell, hoping that somehow or another they’d meet again in the next life. Surely the halls of Mahal had space enough, and the addition of one tiny friend to the dwarves wouldn’t upset any celestial balance. Surely – as long as Bilbo wished it – Thorin’s maker would not begrudge him this. 

Truthfully, though, he did not know if Bilbo would wish it at all. And he could hardly be blamed if he didn’t. Thorin didn’t know where hobbits went when they entered their final slumber, and he cursed himself that he had never asked. He imagined it was similar to the elves and men, and though the idea of Bilbo finding an eternal peace anywhere in the vicinity of Thranduil was hardly what he would have chosen for his small friend, he couldn’t quite force himself to begrudge the thought if it meant that the hobbit found peace at all. 

Still, he had allowed himself a small amount of hope – in a place deep in his heart, where no sword could dream of piercing it – that the final bleary blinks he took on the battlefield would not be the last he’d see of his friend. 

And thus, he awoke. 

“Bilbo, I –“ he began, before pausing and realizing that he now found himself somewhere entirely different to where he’d closed his eyes last. 

He was alone, to begin with, and he felt the loss of the small hand on his arm as if in leaving it had burned him. 

He was indoors, for another thing. Was this the halls of Mahal? They were rather plain, if that was the case. The roof was low, which was – among dwarrow – one of the chiefest signs of poverty. Perhaps he was being punished? 

But the room also struck a chord of recognition in him, and the bed he lay in fit him with a familiarity he did not quite know how to resolve. 

And in looking around, he realized that the sparseness of his quarters was one he knew well. There, in the corner, was a single trunk – likely only partially filled with an assortment of clothes that were largely below his station. 

There, leaning next to his bed, were twin war hammers – dutifully maintained but wholly unimpressive in quality. They were the very hammers he had wielded for years during his time in the Blue Mountains. 

They were the hammers he’d carried when he set out on his quest to reclaim Erebor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, and welcome to my quarantine coping mechanism, so glad you could join me.   
> As a quick note: I mentioned in the tags that this was written in a similar style to the book (just because I love the tone of it so much) but will borrow from both the books and the movies and also my own imagination in terms of lore. It's my fanfic and I'll do what I want to, thank you very much. One important point in that regard, though, is the idea that the Ring stops Bilbo from aging properly, which is alluded to in the books but isn't really thoroughly referenced in the movies. If any of you needed that fact clarified, there you have it.   
> Anyway, besides that all I have to say is: hope you like it! I've got two jobs and I'm in school right now, so I can't promise complete consistency with my uploads, but I'll do my best. In only 24 hours I've written four chapters equalling 12,500 words though, so if this quarantine stuff keeps stressing me out that might not be a problem...


	2. Chapter 2

It was hardly an easy thing, waking up to find that the entirety of your life had been unwritten with the single stroke of some unknown divine pen. But Bilbo Baggins would like to think that he handled it with some grace and dignity. 

Luckily, it was easy to allow himself the illusion, as no one had been there to witness the moment he’d opened his eyes to see the Bag End of more than half a century ago. Nor was there anyone there to hear the creative tapestry of expletives he wove the moment he found his voice. 

“Damnable wizards and their meddling nonsense. I’ll bet Gandalf is behind this, confound him!” he continued as he ransacked his own kitchen for a bit of breakfast with a ferocity it had not seen since the dwarves had made themselves rather comfortable in it all those years ago. 

Or perhaps the kitchen hadn’t yet seen it, he realized as he allotted an impressive amount of effort toward angrily spreading jam across his toast (a task not easily accomplished without some great skill in both grumbling and cooking). Perhaps the dwarves had not yet arrived, or had only just left. Certainly it was around the right time, though he didn’t know how he knew. Looking around, he saw that Bofur’s carving - which he had once placed on the mantle near the portraits of his late parents - was not yet there. Nor were the various maps and manuscripts of their adventures that had eternally swamped his writing desk after his return. So the journey was not over and done with yet. But perhaps it was still some years to come, or perhaps it would never happen at all. Was this the afterlife? It didn’t feel as if it were, but Bilbo was not at all confident he’d be able to pin down what it was supposed to feel like in the first place if he were to be asked. 

He stormed out of his little round door at the very thought, dressed in only his nightgown and with bread still in hand, a sight completely unbecoming of the Bilbo Baggins who had been so respected before he’d run off with fairy tale kings and engaged in battles of wits with dragons and creatures of the dark. And with little consideration at all to that fact, he turned to spot Bell Goodchild, Hamfast’s new bride, putting down compost among her tomatoes. 

“G’morning Master Baggins!” she called out goodnaturedly. “Enjoying your breakfast out of doors today? The weather is nice enough for it.” 

From nearly any other hobbit Bilbo would have considered this a backhanded slight, but Bell was a good sort and had married into a wonderful family, so he had no doubt she meant it all entirely. 

“Yes, yes it certainly is.” He said - a bit rushed to get to his point, manners be dratted. “Please pardon my asking, but what year is it? I must have had a bit too much of a certain vintage red last night, and I think I’d likely have lost my feet at this point if they weren’t so attached to me.” 

Bell laughed good-naturedly at that old saw, and replied easily enough. “It’s 2941, Master Baggins, and a Trewsday besides, if that helps any further. Are you quite well, though? My Hamfast has never drunk quite so much as to forget the date, though it’s certainly not for a lack of trying I’ll have you believe!” 

“I am… Yes, I’m quite well, thank you, thank you Missus Gamgee,” Bilbo said, still harried, and becomingly increasingly aware of the lack of trousers beneath his long gown. “I’ll just be getting on then, best to start my second breakfast early if I’m to recover in time for…Oh, goodness me, is that coffee grounds you’re putting on your tomatoes?” 

“That it is, Master Baggins, and good eye for catching it.” said Bell conspiratorially. “I trust you’ll keep this between us neighbors, but I’ve found coffee grounds, wood ash, and a dash of lime will do wonders for the colors on a vegetable… And if you don’t believe me, you can see the pin I won for these very tomatoes at last year’s Yule Fair!” 

“By my beard,” said Bilbo, so engaged that he accidentally slipped into an exclamation used only by dwarves, and which made entirely no sense at all in relation to his own smooth and round face. “I believe you well enough Missus Gamgee, though I never would have thought of it myself. Wonderful, absolutely wonderful.” He said, as he began to wander away back indoors. 

“Good day to you, Master Baggins!” Bell called out behind him. 

“Call me Bilbo!” He returned, before absentmindedly slamming his little green door behind him. 

“Trewsday, Trewsday, Trewsday…” he muttered to himself as he paced his entryway, trying to remember what day it was that the dwarves had first come spilling through his door. “Midway through Thrimidge, judging by those tomatoes and the extent of my luck.” He then found himself in his study, and wandered around it for a bit - searching for his diary to find the exact day in question, before remembering it was likely as empty as his home felt at the moment. 

“Well, there’s nothing for it, I’ll just have to guess.” He decided at last, and he began to dwarrow-proof his hobbit hole at once. Doilies were laid carefully in tightly locked drawers, his mother’s glory box was dragged rather unceremoniously into his bedroom and a far less important trunk was put in its place. And - after much deliberation - his fine china remained out. The dwarves had been remarkably good at maintaining it, despite their theatrics, and by the time they had reached the Shire many of them had already done a good deal of traveling and adventuring to get there, so they certainly deserved it. Besides, they were honored guests in his home, lacking in table manners though they were. 

Somehow, it was only then that the gravity of what lay before him really struck Bilbo. He had slept side by side beneath the stars with these dwarves for months, had learned what made them laugh and how many of them sounded when they cried. Not only did he know Gloin, but he knew the young Gimli who would make his father so proud all those years in the future. Not only did he know Bifur, but he had a rudimentary knowledge of Inglishmêk, which he had taught himself one of those long boring days the road so they could have small signed conversations despite the great dwarven secrecy surrounding Khuzdul. Not only did he know Kili and Fili, but he had fought alongside them in battle, and watched them die, and never forgot it for a single day in all the decades that followed. 

And now he was expected to pretend as if none of that was true. As if he didn’t know what dangers lay ahead of them, and how they could possibly be averted. 

As if he didn’t know the danger of the ring he would certainly have to carry once more, and wasn’t at all afraid of what would happen were the dwarves to find out. 

He loved and trusted the heart of every dwarf he had traveled with, after all. But he did not trust their minds. Not a single one of them had held up entirely against the thrall of the cursed gold that lay even now – mountains and forests and a half-frozen lake away - beneath the belly of a sleeping dragon. And chambers upon chambers of treasure could not hope to hold a candle to the pull of the One Ring. Their intentions would be good, just as Boromir’s had been, and just as Isildur’s had been before him…. Even poor Frodo - the best among them, in Bilbo’s opinion - had suffered a great deal while in its grip. 

But no, Bilbo would spare him from that this time around. He’d spare all of them as much of the grief their previous journey had laid upon them as possible. 

He didn’t know quite how he had been brought back in time, nor to what purpose. But he knew the weight of Middle Earth itself was now laid across his small, soft shoulders. And all he could do was his very best. 

With that determined he changed into a nice springtime vest, and went to his garden for a smoke. 

***** 

Three days, he spent like that. Sitting in his garden and puffing out smoke ring after smoke ring of precious Longbottom Leaf. No doubt the neighbors considered it downright wasteful, and were bemoaning his apparent loss of sanity behind their cracked shutters. If only they knew how much more peculiar he was about to become. 

Bilbo was not strictly certain that his meeting Gandalf while in his garden was important, and in fact he rather doubted it. But even so, the delicate balance of this newfound universe was foreign to him, and he’d be damned if he was going to lose out on the adventure entirely simply because he felt a bit of a chill. 

Finally - well into the afternoon on a rather slow Sterday, with his eyes shut against the sun that was now affixed almost directly in his line of sight - Bilbo felt the soft whiff of smoke against his nose, and knew that Gandalf had at last arrived. 

A pair of merry eyes peeked at him beneath the brim of a wizard’s hat – which looked woefully uncomfortable in the afternoon heat, Bilbo noted absently. And merry though they were, they held no depth of recognition beyond acquaintanceship, nor did they contain any of the mischief he’d expect if this whole bungled mess was Gandalf’s doing. 

Blast it all, it seemed Bilbo was alone in this one. 

“Good morning.” He called out, for Gandalf was standing motionless and apparently content in the road outside his garden gate, and seemed to have no intention of coming any closer for a more civilized chat. 

He’d rather been hoping he’d be able to come up with something a bit cleverer this time around, if for no other reason than to spare himself the wizard’s nonsensical twistery, and he was rather annoyed that when the moment came he was unsuccessful. But he hadn’t anticipated the pang of guilt that immediately accompanied the knowledge that he was about to lie to his newfound and oldest friend, even if only by omission. 

“ – simply stating that this is a morning to be good on?” Gandalf concluded, looking a mite too happy with himself about the chance to confuse a hobbit’s strict mannerisms. 

“None of them at all, I suppose, if you’re going to be silly about it.” Bilbo said, just to be spiteful. “I merely meant to wish you a generally good day going forward, as you well know, but of course you wizards must always complicate things unnecessarily.” 

“On the contrary, Master Baggins, I consider complication to be of the utmost necessity.” Gandalf said, clearly delighted to have met his first conversational match in what was likely to have been a long time. “But how do you know I’m a wizard at all?” 

“And how do you know I’m a Baggins?” Bilbo countered, now thoroughly enjoying himself as well. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his friend, much as he’d bemoaned his very name these last few days. “Truth be told, the outfit rather gives it away. I’ve met more men in my life than I’d care to, but none of them were quite nonsensical enough to dress like that on a warming spring day. Besides, my mother spoke of you every now and then. Gandalf the Grey, I have no doubt. You match her description exactly.” 

“Ah, Belladonna.” Gandalf said, his smile turning gentle, though his eyes took on a calculating look that Bilbo did not like at all, as if something about the hobbit confused him. He’d have to tone it down a bit, it seemed… “I was sorry to hear of her passing, though it was long ago at this point. She was a wonderful hobbit, you have my sincerest condolences.” 

“Thank you,” Bilbo replied, his heart thumping nervously in his chest, “I’m sure she would have appreciated them. Now why are you here, if you don’t mind my asking? Surely you’re not still peddling fireworks?” 

“Whyever not, for what else is a wizard to do these days?” asked Gandalf merrily. “Though if you must know, I’m looking for someone to share in an adventure.” 

And suddenly, Bilbo didn’t quite know if he had it in him to act shocked. It was one thing to keep the truth from an old friend for his own good, but it was another entirely to make believe about it. Instead his words came out sounding a tad frightened, though not for any reason Gandalf was likely to assume. Still, it had a similar effect. 

“An – an adventure? That seems to be… that is to say, we hobbits don’t tend to enjoy that sort of thing. You’ll have to try your hand east of Bree, among the men, I’d imagine. Not that I’m saying no. Or perhaps I am. Perhaps I ought to, come to think of it.” 

Gandalf observed his nervousness patiently, his mouth twisting into a disappointed frown beneath that bushy beard of his. 

“I see you have changed, Bilbo Baggins, and not entirely for the better. Your mother would have leapt at the chance, you know, and I believe you have more Took in you than you realize. All this Baggins-ness is not good for your soul.” 

“Ha!” Thought Bilbo, “You don’t have the first idea about my poor soul. It’s been through enough as it is.” 

“Just the same,” he said aloud, in a tone he hoped was slightly more firm, “I do definitely think, now, that it’s wisest that I refuse you.”

And he cast his eyes around nervously at his own declaration, for he did not know whether it was wisest at all. 

“It may be wise, I grant you, but are you sure it’s altogether smart? Come now, Bilbo Baggins, I’ve never known a hobbit to refuse a guest.” Gandalf said a bit sternly, leaning on his wizard’s staff as if the very weight of his disappointment in Bilbo’s stuffiness was bearing him down. “You will not be obliged to join me on my journey if you do not wish it, but at least allow me to visit you later this evening with a few of my esteemed companions. I can promise you good stories and wonderful entertainment, for such is the delightful nature of dwarves whether they mean for it or not. And we will pass through your home without complaint quickly enough if you do not choose to join us, but I rather think you ought to consider it first. Offers of true adventure come so few and far between these days, especially in the Shire.”

“Indeed they do, and I imagine we’re quite well off because of it.” Bilbo said, heading to his mailbox and – with a display of angry dramatism that would have made his dwarves proud – haughtily inspecting each of his letters in turn without reading a word of them. “Dinner is at 6, and I really shan’t be waiting for you if you don’t turn up on time. A wizard may arrive exactly when he means to, but I think he’ll find his food will go cold regardless of his almighty intentions…” The hobbit huffed and puffed a bit then, quite out of things to say, but not yet out of the energy with which to say them. “Well then… Good day.” 

And with that, he marched determinedly up to his door and closed it forcefully - before leaning carefully against the smooth cool wood of it, his ear pressed tight, listening for the sound of Gandalf’s approach. 

Had he done it wrong? Would Gandalf perhaps decide with all his nervousness and bluster that he was too frail for this adventure? Would he go ask the neighbors, leaving… Valar forbid…. The lives of his precious company in the hands of some Sackville-Baggins? 

He held his breath, terrified that he’d miss something, anything at all… Until finally, after what felt like far too long, he heard the soft scratch of the wizard’s staff as he carved a crude rune right into Bilbo’s lovely green paint. 

“- good day’ed by the son of Belladonna Took,” he heard Gandalf distantly grumbling, “never thought I’d live to see it.” His voice trailed off then, as he retreated down to the road. 

And Bilbo sighed in relief. 

One trial down, the rest of the adventure to go.


	3. Chapter 3

Thorin had, unfortunately, gone quite mad. 

It was the only explanation that came to Balin’s mind, and – as with everything – he’d given it quite a bit of thought. 

It seemed to have begun a few days before they departed the Blue Mountains to meet with the wizard in Bree and begin their monumental quest. As Dis had described it, he had woken late that morning and charged out of his room like a dwarrow possessed, and he would not be calmed until he had assured himself that she and her sons were alive and well, and given them a long and slightly sweaty hug that had quite interrupted their attempt at breakfast. 

Thorin. Thorin had done that. 

Thorin, son of Thráin, son of Thrór. 

Balin had entered the once-royal family’s small home only shortly afterward with a polite knock on the already open door, intending to discuss a variety of last minute changes to the contracts that were to be supplied to each of the members of the company, only to instead be accosted by his friend and always-king as the dwarf demanded to know what day it was, and what year, and where they were, and how it was that he’d survived. What it was that he’d survived, exactly, was never made clear, and Balin and Dis had somewhat forcibly dismissed it as having been a particularly bad dream mixed with a particularly bad hangover.

Only Thorin didn’t drink much, and they both knew it. He thought it was an unnecessary expense, when the money could be put toward feeding his family. But what else were they to do? 

In the end, it had seemed that Thorin had returned to normal over the next few days. His brooding had taken on a new tenor, certainly - now more contemplative and worried than overbearingly angry, and this was for the most part a good thing. But it was Kili, surprisingly, who had pointed out what the rest of them couldn’t quite put a finger on. 

Thorin also looked sad. 

It was altogether different from the sadness they had seen him bear after Erebor had burned, with so many of his people alongside it. It was different, also, from the sadness they’d seen after Frerin’s untimely death. There was no describing it, as far as they could tell, only that it was different, and new, and no one quite knew where it had come from. 

But being as they were about to embark on a quest - the thought of which had followed at Thorin’s heel like a persistent and slightly threatening dog that had would not be forgotten, ever since they had all been so brutally removed from their home in the first place - those closest to him decided to chalk it up to an interesting case of nerves. It only made sense, after all. After a lifetime of loss, Thorin – who had always refused to chance the wellbeing of his people for any venture that might threaten to hurt them as much as it may help – was now assuming a greater risk than anyone else in Middle Earth had yet dared, with the hope that he could open up their home to them once more. It was quite a lot to take on, and though this new way of coping with his stress was a tad surprising to those who knew him, they did not blame him for it in the slightest. 

What worried Balin, though, was that it only seemed to get worse as the Blue Mountains disappeared at their backs, and the walled-off exterior of Bree began to grow distantly in the horizon. 

They met Gandalf the wizard there in a small and unappealing pub named the Prancing Pony - tucked away behind drunks and raucous gamblers in a dingy corner booth where even the ogling eyes of men were likely to pass them by - and it was explained to them then that they were to continue their travel westwardly, toward the Shire. If Thorin was at all surprised by this as Balin was, though, his face gave no indication. Indeed, he had instead looked – if anything – sadder, and a bit nervous, and in fact almost as if he were about to be sick. 

“Are you quite alright, Master Oakenshield?” Gandalf said, his expression more one of interest than of concern, truth be told. “You look rather as if you’ve seen a particularly gruesome ghost. Surely the halls of men are not so distasteful to you that you’d leave your pint untouched.” 

“I thank you, Tharkûn, but I am quite well.” Thorin replied, his voice steady but not quite as commanding as usual, and his flagon-ful of ale now pushed entirely aside. “Your concern is appreciated as much as your meddling, I’m sure.” 

Ah, there was the old Thorin that Balin knew. 

“Peace, Thorin,” he cut in then, “I’m sure Master Gandalf only meant well. We can set off now, and we may just reach this hobbit hole the wizard speaks of by sundown. Perhaps some food will set your mind right, I’m sure our host will be willing to provide.” 

“Indeed,” Gandalf cut in then, his overt interest in Thorin’s behavior only having doubled at his weakly-executed rudeness, “you have not truly eaten until you’ve eaten with a hobbit, I can assure you. Though they do not quite match your kind in height, they’ll put away twice the amount of a single dwarf and be left asking for a helping of dessert besides. It’s quite astounding.” 

Thorin’s lips twitched slightly at the description, but his odd behavior did not falter in the least. 

“I think, Balin,” he said after some small pause for thought, “I may just go on a walk beforehand. There is much to consider in the days to come, and I would like to give myself a moment to do so.” 

“Are you quite sure, Thorin? The roads can be dangerous, even here, and-” Balin began generously, more concerned with his king getting lost than beheaded, truth be told. 

“I am.” Thorin said, his tone now firm and nearly back to normal. “The Shire cannot be so complex, I’m sure I’ll find the way easily enough, and will join you there soon.” 

And with no more farewell than that, he rose and exited the Prancing Pony, ducking past careless drunkards who threatened to knock him aside in their stupefaction with so little malice toward their disrespect that it was almost like he was entirely unaware of them to begin with. 

“Odd, and getting odder…” Gandalf mumbled, and Balin downed the rest of his own pint in silent agreement. 

**** 

Truly - Thorin thought as his feet carried him steadily toward nowhere in particular - there was no one who had suffered at the hands of fate more than he.

Not that it was even half of what he deserved, when he considered it for a moment longer. The dwarrow were granted one love in their life, as a divine gift from Mahal himself, and what had he done with his? He’d refused to recognize the poor hobbit for the first leg of their journey, had allowed him to be met with greater perils than his soft sensibilities were truly suited for – brave as he was – and when Thorin had finally resolved to acknowledge the tremendous and unshakeable pull his burglar had over him he almost immediately after allowed his weak mind to succumb to a more familiar longing for gold, hollow and fruitless though it was in comparison. 

He’d held Bilbo over the ramparts of the home he had hoped to make suitable for the both of them, and had truly considered casting him down. He’d been held by Bilbo on the battlefield, and made the hobbit watch him die without even expressing the depth of his devotion in any small amount. He knew the Bilbo of then could hardly have loved him back, even in friendship. But the weight of unconfessed adoration felt to Thorin like a debt he owed, which he now could not possibly consider repaying. 

And that was truly the crux of his torment, at the moment. No sooner had he realized that he had been granted the chance to live it all again… To travel with the dwarrow he already considered family rather than mere acquaintances, to share in their company and their joy and pain once more. To watch his nephews grow into the capable and cunning dwarves he had always known they could be, and this time to save them. To see the face of his One again, though the hobbit’s eyes would cruelly hold no recognition, and to spare the poor halfling from his own madness... No sooner had the blessing of the opportunity struck him than the weight of his responsibility in the matter had followed heavily behind. 

He could not possibly allow Bilbo to grow close to him this time around, he realized. As much as it would pain him to hold the burglar at a distance, it was the only way he could in some small part atone for his previous treatment of his poor friend. He could not guarantee that his weak mind would be able to fight off the gold sickness once more, though he now anticipated and feared it in equal measure. And he could not possibly subject Bilbo to even the smallest chance that he would be forced, once again, to be cast off by his friends, to have been made silent promises of utter devotion only to have them torn away and his life instead threatened over a cursed jewel. He could never repay his unending debt to the hobbit of his past life, but by Mahal he would ensure that the hobbit of this one would want for nothing. 

And perhaps, if the Battle of the Five Armies was won, and he yet lived, and if Bilbo chose to remain in Erebor among his friends…. Thorin might then attempt to build a friendship too. 

Perhaps – though it seemed hardly possible to comprehend, obscured as it was by the many treacherous obstacles that yet stood in their way… Perhaps, if Bilbo was willing to be his friend all those years later, he might even allow Thorin to speak to him honestly of his love. It had survived so purely as they had crossed cliffs and chasms, and floated down rivers, and faced dragons side by side. It had even survived the thrall of the gold, in the end, though he had been far too foolish to recognize it. And it had survived his abrupt awakening in an entirely new world, seeming as simple and true and firm as it ever was. Thorin had no doubt that were he to live centuries more, not a day would pass when it ever faltered. His love for the hobbit felt like a diamond wedged carefully into his otherwise weak and simple heart. No matter how easily the rest of him could be destroyed – a fact he had now faced head on – the part of him that was devoted to the little burglar could never be crushed. 

He was under no delusions that the hobbit might return his feelings. In fact, much as it further tormented him to acknowledge, if Thorin was to do this right it was very possible Bilbo would want to have little to do with him at all. But the chance to one day speak his mind on the matter offered Thorin some small relief, and he hoped it would not burden his friend overmuch. 

Yes, it was decided. He would do his best to protect the hobbit, at whatever cost to him that might require. It was his duty. 

That decision made, he finally cast his eyes around, searching for some recognizable landmark that could guide him to his ultimate destination. And he found that he had wandered far longer than he’d noticed, as night had long since fallen and most of the smials that surrounded the narrow dirt road he now trod were shut tight, with welcoming and warm candlelight pouring from their windows and short glances of wonderful little gatherings of hobbit families feasting on one of their many meals together held within. The moon was full above him, luckily, and the stars were brighter in the Shire than anywhere else he’d ever seen on his travels, so Thorin was able to find his way without much stumbling. Regardless, he didn’t have to go far. Though he had taken the long way round, he had no doubt, it seemed his unguided feet had borne him to the very lane that Bag End was nestled into. He recognized it at once, as often as he’d pictured the place when his friend had told stories of home and shared his excitement to return to it. There was the round green door, well maintained with the exception of the rune the old wizard had so unkindly scratched into it. There was the bench in the front, where Bilbo enjoyed sitting for a smoke – Longbottom Leaf, and no other pipeweed would do, as much as it all tasted the same to Thorin. 

Inside, he heard the muffled echoes of the joyful shouts and singing of the dwarves, and he at once longed to see them and share in their company as much as he had ever wished to finish their thrice-damned quest the first time around, with his rush to reach their kingdom. He hadn’t appreciated it then, but those nights on the road among friends had now become memories that were more precious to him than any glorious death on the battlefield or legendary place in their shared history once would have been. 

And so – his stomach tied in knots, but his mind now made up with a grim determination – he approached the small wooden door, and knocked.


	4. Chapter 4

Bilbo had been through much in his overly-long life, but this he could hardly bear. 

His friends had arrived, one by one, pleased to meet him and full of how-do-you-do’s. And really - with his advantageous knowledge of dwarven mannerisms - he was this time around able to recognize that they were doing their utmost to be polite and maintain a certain messy decorum. It was only that no manners of any other race would ever be quite up to snuff to a hobbit, much less a gentlehobbit of Bag End who was descended from a most respectable line of Bagginses. And besides, many of his friends were also common folk, and all had spent the last few decades – if not their entire lives – impoverished, so they could hardly be faulted for not having brushed up on which fork paired with what dish, and whether or not to slurp their soup. 

No, it was not their lack of manners that tortured Bilbo, but rather that they were bothering to have any at all. After all their traveling together the dwarves he had once known had long since lost any pretense, and were perfectly comfortable being as horrifyingly impolite as they pleased. And though Bilbo had stubbornly maintained his dignity and never once so much as burped in front of them (though they had accused him of it a time or two), he had grown comfortable with their distasteful behavior, and found that he missed it. 

Now, though, they came through his door one by one – and then all at once – and made sure to wipe the mud off their boots (even if it was on the perfectly nice chest in his front room rather than on the doorstep) and they did their dishes (even if it was with a good deal of dwarven fanfare and silliness) and they’d left their weapons in the entryway (which he now knew to be a flattering show of good faith in someone they had not once met). And as they did it all they looked at him with a polite lack of recognition, which had only changed to a sort of uncomfortable concern when his face went rather pale and he quickly excused himself to his room to gather his wits and stop his ridiculous wallowing. 

It was all very horrible. 

He knew, of course, that they would likely build new friendships before long. Perhaps faster, this time around, as he meant to do his utmost to avoid being a burden and a complainer. 

Though he would not be a Baggins if he did not complain a little. 

But the friendships would be slightly different, of course. There was no going back, no matter how much it pained him, and there was only forward to worry about. Luckily, if there was one thing he was good at – with his century-and-some-change of experience with life and all the nonsense that trailed alongside it - it was stoically moving onward, no matter how he might want to stop and allow himself to rest. 

So he’d quickly scrubbed a hand over his face, and patted his cheeks a few times to bring some color to them, and marched right back out there to serve the dwarrow he so loved and yet somehow hardly knew the next course in their first proper hobbitly meal. 

In fact he was so distracted by the effort of it all, and the guilt that once again accompanied the sense that he was – somehow, if only slightly – lying to his friends, that he almost forgot to be terribly nervous about the impending arrival of their leader and king. 

Almost, but not quite. 

His friends sharpened his knives even as they joked about blunting them, and cleaned the mess they’d left behind in their revelry with the sensible dish towels Bilbo had left out rather than with his doilies, and then suddenly there was a knock at the door. 

It was Thorin. Surely it was. 

He swallowed his nervousness so forcefully his tongue had almost followed suit, and re-tucked his shirt – if for no other reason than to fidget, as the king’s first impression of him was likely to be poor no matter how much he fussed with his appearance – and advanced carefully on his own entryway with the smallest sense that he was walking to his death. Which was of course rather silly. 

He would have liked to have made their first meeting more of a moment, if he was honest, but in his nervousness he hardly remembered opening the door at all. All he knew was that suddenly it was ajar, letting a bit of the chill of the springtime night wash over his bare feet, and there was Thorin. 

He’d been looking to the distance the last time, Bilbo remembered that quite well. He’d been struck at once by the self-assured majesty of the king, even as he’d been entirely annoyed by his presence in the first place. But this time Thorin was instead looking down at his doorstep, seemingly deep in thought. 

“Thorin Oakenshield, at your service” he said, with a bow, his firm gaze toward the flower pot on Bilbo’s porch unbroken. 

He certainly hadn’t bowed so deeply last time… How odd, Bilbo thought. 

But he returned the expression of allegiance easily, and said “Bilbo Baggins, at yours.” 

And then he looked up, their eyes finally meeting across the threshold of his home, which he had so far quite rudely neglected to invite Thorin into, and he noticed something he apparently had not before. 

Thorin looked sad. 

It was very possible, in fact very likely, that he had looked the same way the last time Bilbo had met him, and with his lack of knowledge regarding the minute microexpressions of the dwarven king he’d quite missed it. But sure enough, his eyes were slightly tighter, and his calm expression slightly strained, and there was something in his unmoving gaze that refused to settle. And it broke Bilbo’s heart a bit to see it now. Thorin had no doubt been in pain right from the beginning - his home having been taken from him, his people left to live in relative squalor, and he with only the perils of their journey ahead to comfort him. Bilbo had considered it, distantly, the first time around, but it had then seemed to be nothing more than the necessarily heroic backstory that lent the ruler a sense of intrinsic nobility. Now, though, it was only the unhappiness of a good friend, and Bilbo longed to hug him for it. 

Of course, such an unannounced expression would have been a bit out of place even in the best days of their friendship, and it would certainly be unwelcome now. As it stood, to Thorin he was currently no more than a burglar, or perhaps even a grocer if their once-trod routine remained. And so instead he stepped aside, and gestured mutely for his unfamiliar love to enter, and whispered something or another about his friends having left him some food in the kitchen - just down the hall on your left, and then a few doors down on the same side, you can’t miss it – before retreating a bit pathetically to his front porch to deal with his emotions in the only way a properly repressed hobbit could. 

He went to have a smoke about it. 

*****

Gandalf the Grey was, of course, a wizard. And wizards, as a rule, abhorred boredom. 

This was not true of all of them, it should be noted. Radagast the Brown was quite a distinguished exception, and he was known to go to great and complicated lengths just to give himself nothing to do. 

But most, if not all, of the rest of the Istari were so horrified at the mere thought of monotony you’d think there was something terrible at the end of it. And in fact they likely would have preferred there to be, as it would have given them something to look forward to. 

Luckily, one of the key elements of Middle Earth was that there was absolutely no controlling it. It was always in chaos, and even those among them whose job it was to quantify and give definition to the disarray by use of various -ology’s and -ism’s were in the end only ever able to describe how little they’d been able to figure out in twice as many words as they would have when they started. It was quite comforting to an eternal being such as himself, in fact. Of course, if everyone simply listened to Gandalf’s advice when he gave it the world would likely be set right in time for dinner, but that would inevitably leave him bored and with nothing to grumble over, and so he secretly preferred it just as it was. 

That was one of the many things he loved about hobbits, however. They could be as bullheaded as any other race, and would be twice as much so if you dared to tell them they couldn’t. But they were perfectly willing to go without trying to figure out the larger answers to life, though perhaps it was because - unlike the elves and dwarves - they hardly lived long enough to figure out what the right questions were. 

Or perhaps not, Gandalf had mused every now and then. Perhaps they had figured it all out centuries ago, and over the heavily-laden table during one of their six meals a day they’d discuss wondering just what it was all the other races were so bothered about all the time. 

Regardless, Gandalf quite liked a hobbit with a hearty spirit in them, and he loved a curiosity. And Bilbo Baggins was, it seemed, a good deal of both. 

Predictions and forecasts were more the purview of Saruman the White, and Gandalf the Grey had always held that if he was a medium he was only a rather small one. But days ago he had received a premonition of a sort, or perhaps a prompting of some kind or another, and though he knew that the plucking of Fate’s hand on the strings of the universe was a rather clumsy one – all truth be told - he was not nearly foolish enough to ignore her music entirely. 

And so, on a whim, he had wandered through Hobbiton on his way to meet with the dwarves of Erebor, led only by the vaguest sense that it might be possible he needed to. And it was lucky indeed that he’d done it, as it turned out, for the moment he’d laid eyes on Bilbo he knew with a perfect surety that the little hobbit was exactly what their quest was missing. 

He remembered the young Baggins of Bag End, if only barely, having met him when he was just a child - and therefore far more interested in the fireworks the wizard often carried with him than any of the more astounding implications of his having been a wizard in the first place. Although, truthfully, that was not uncommon for a hobbit of any size, and it was another of the many things he loved about them. 

Indeed, he had recognized Bilbo in only an instant or two, and for a moment it had seemed as though Bilbo had recognized him right back. The conversation that had followed was as exceedingly odd as the look in his eyes had been when they first met - as well as being thoroughly frustrating besides - and if Gandalf hadn’t already been certain (in the murky and uncertain way a premonition always was) that the quest wouldn’t succeed without Bilbo taking part in it, he likely would have insisted that the little fellow come along anyway for his own amusement. 

He was certain, though. As much as one ever could be when something so unreliable as destiny was involved. Whatever it was that was actually important about their upcoming adventure, it couldn’t possibly be accomplished without Bilbo Baggins. 

He had prepared a speech to that effect as he made his way merrily back to the Prancing Pony to meet with Thorin Oakenshield. Quite a good speech it had been too, full of vague arguments and ideas without conclusions. That was one of the many secrets of the wizards, after all: if you didn’t make your promises too specific you couldn’t possibly be called entirely wrong about any of them. And so he had meant to make various allusions to the dwarves about lucky numbers and the stealthiness of hobbits, but it had turned out that he needn’t have bothered. The dwarf king - who in their last meeting only weeks ago had been fiery and passionate and quite ridiculously angry, in a manner befitting of all the equally dramatic members of his ancestry Gandalf had met before – had patiently accepted his proposal of a slight delay in their schedule without pause, and had countered Gandalf’s attempt to needle him into a more interesting reaction with a subdued annoyance that in his bloodline could have been counted as downright diplomacy. 

It was all very odd. Very odd indeed. Gandalf was thrilled about it. 

And if he had wondered whether the topsy-turviness of everything would settle before he’d had a chance to truly enjoy it, he was only to be delighted once more. Things merely got curiouser as the night progressed, and by the time dessert had rolled around he was seated in Bag End, veritably drowning in dwarves, and wondering if their displaced king-under-no-mountain-at-all-at-the-moment was entirely well. Gone was the vulnerable openness he had so confusingly draped himself with during their earlier meeting, and the familiar mask of stoicism he more traditionally wore had instead returned in full. But those eyes of his were far more expressive than the royal dwarf realized, it would seem, and it had been altogether shocking when the only authentic emotion that Gandalf had been able to discern within them at his proclamation that he possessed the key to Erebor’s side door was a deep and troubling trepidation. Indeed, it had been left to Dwalin to demand just how it was that Gandalf had gotten his hands on what should rightfully be Thorin’s, as the king himself had only accepted the gift as if it were some sort of grim burden rather than a joyful revelation. 

“If there is a key, there must be a door!” Fili had then exclaimed, overjoyed at his own cleverness. 

“There’s another way in!” Kili had added, not to be outdone. 

Truly the wisdom of the dwarrow was the stuff of legends. 

“Certainly, if we can find it,” Gandalf had said (and rather graciously too). “But the doors of dwarves are invisible when closed. The answer lies hidden somewhere in this map, though I do not have the skill to find it. Luckily, there are others in Middle Earth who can. Now, the task I have in mind will require a great deal of stealth, and no small amount of courage. If we are careful and clever, though, I believe it can be done.” 

“That’s why we need a burglar.” Ori provided sagely, and Gandalf privately thought to his own amusement that the astute addition rounded out their awe-inspiring meeting of the minds rather nicely. 

“Indeed we do, Master Ori,” he said. “And quite a good one too. Speaking of which, where is our hobbit? Surely he was here only a moment ago?” 

“A testament to his skill, perhaps!” Bofur declared genially, and the other dwarves cheered at the thought.

“Master Baggins is on his front porch,” Thorin’s low voice rumbled to contribute after their revelry died down, in what was almost certainly the longest sentence he’d yet spoken that night. “I believe he is indulging in some pipeweed, though he’s been out there a while yet.” 

“Ah,” said Gandalf, “Well perhaps I ought to fetch him then. It’s a pity I did not notice his absence sooner, for I’m sure the story of this quest is not one your lot enjoy repeating.” 

“I can explain it to him, if I must.” Thorin said, his jaw clenching slightly even as a frown knit his brows together. “I will not have him join us for this journey if he does not fully understand the risks he assumes in doing so.” 

“That’s quite alright, Master Oakenshield.” Gandalf replied. “I’m sure I can do it well enough, and you really ought to eat your meal before it goes cold and spoils. Poor Bilbo slaved away over it, I have no doubt, and there are many days of hunger yet ahead of us.” 

Thorin, mystifyingly, did exactly as he was told, and began to shovel large forkfuls of meaty pie into his still-frowning mouth as if he hadn’t even realized it was in front of him until it had been pointed out. Shaking his head at the unquantifiable absurdity of dwarves, Gandalf then left their party to revel in the glory of a voyage they had not yet begun to undertake, and sought out the more sensible company of their host. 

He oughtn’t have gotten his hopes up in that regard, as it turned out, for when he at last found Bilbo sitting at the same bench on which he’d encountered him earlier, the hobbit was chewing absentmindedly on the stem of a pipe that had long since gone out and staring at absolutely nothing at all. Gandalf was one of the more charitable of his kind however, as well as a show-off, and with a wave of his hand he re-lit the small fellow’s pipeweed from afar. 

Bilbo seemed to appreciate this, for it jolted him from his reverie and he began to pull long and contented draws of smoke, which he then exhaled to create a remarkable number of rings all in perfect succession. 

“Goodness me,” Gandalf exclaimed at seeing him do so, “however did you come by such a skill at your age? I’ve never known a member of any race to have developed such a fine ability as that without a hundred years of practice at the very least!” 

Bilbo squinted at him, as if to determine whether he was being made fun of, before he shrugged and repeated the trick - finishing it off with a rather pleased smile. “That’s for me to know and you to wonder, Master Gandalf.” He said, and rather smugly too. 

Upon glimpsing the tantalizing tip of yet another intriguing mystery, Gandalf pulled out a pipe of his own, and – joining Bilbo on the bench – he vindictively shot a puff of smoke shaped like a thoroughly fat dragonfly straight through Bilbo’s latest set of rings. 

“I think I will be joining you on your little adventure after all.” Bilbo said at last, after a long silence - filled only with the chirrup of crickets and the faint buzzing noise that all comfortable nights contained - had passed between them. 

Gandalf looked to his companion in surprise, nearly choking on a mouthful of smoke. “Are you quite sure? You haven’t even heard our proposed journey yet, and I rather thought you’d take a bit more convincing.” 

“The window to the dining room is open,” Bilbo gestured lazily, pipe in hand, “so I heard you all quite well. And I am sure. Or at least I know that I might be.” 

Gandalf waited then for an explanation, but no further one was offered. So he instead sat and watched in silence as the vaporous insect he had willed into existence flew around Bilbo’s magnificent garden for a moment, before colliding with a fence post and dissolving into the breeze. 

“Well then, if your mind is made up, Master Hobbit… There’s little else to do but have you sign the contract.” Gandalf began, his spirits much lifted at the hobbit’s unexpected willingness. 

“Not so fast.” A deep voice cut into their comfortable conversation rather thunderously, and Thorin stepped into their line of sight with a scowl upon his face. Confusticated dwarves, with all their brooding and lurking… 

“The perils of the journey have not been properly enumerated,” Thorin continued, undeterred by the rather sharp glare he received from the wizard, “and I fear that one living such a soft life as yours, Master Baggins, will be unable to anticipate properly what truly lays ahead.” 

Bilbo, to his credit, returned the bebothered king’s dark look without hesitation. “I can only imagine you meant offense in saying as much, Master Oakenshield, and you’ll be glad to hear that I take plenty of it.” He said haughtily. “You know very little of my life or what I have and have not done, and I’ll thank you not to make grand declarations about me based only on the fact that I’ve allowed you into my home and tried to make you comfortable in it.” 

Again, Gandalf thought that the dwarf’s eyes betrayed him, as a glimmer of delight passed over them for reasons the wizard could not begin to imagine – though that certainly wouldn’t stop him from trying. But quicker than it had appeared, the expression was once again gone, and the impenetrably stern disinterest he wore so well replaced it. 

“I’ll grant you that I know far less than I’d like of your life here, Master Burglar.” Thorin said stonily. “But it’s nevertheless true that you must know equally little of how I have lived mine. So allow me to elaborate for you: on this journey we are likely to encounter a great many perils. Trolls and goblins, which will only be followed by orcs and their warg steeds. We will cross perilous mountains and pass through all the dangers of Mirkwood. There we will risk a slow death of starvation, or a torturous one at the hands of their spiders, or a truly unbearable one at the feet of the elf king Thranduil. And on the other side of this there lays in wait a dragon, Smaug the Terrible, which will be perfectly willing to snap you up in its jaws and swallow you whole as easily as it would look at you. Between each of these perils there will be an equal number that I cannot predict besides, no matter how I may wish to. And there will be little to reward you at the end of it, you must understand. You are guaranteed one-fourteenth of the treasure, of course, but if you will allow me to make one final judgement about you based only on the glimpse of your character you have thus far permitted me… You do not seem the type to be easily tempted by the simple wiles of silver and gold.” 

Gandalf, privately, thought that the dwarf king’s list of impending terrors was a tad dramatic, if not downright excessive. But as Thorin had only worked himself up into an even greater outrage as he’d continued to tally every potential threat he could conceive of, the old wizard felt it would be wise to keep his mouth shut on the matter. 

Bilbo, however, seemed entirely unphased. “I understand all of that quite well, Master Oakenshield.” He replied with a calm self-assurance well beyond his years. “And while I’d like to prevent as much of what you have described as possible, I am not afraid to face whatever dangers are necessary to return you dwarves to your mountain.” 

At this, a fraction of the lost and saddened look Thorin had worn earlier that day returned. “Why?” He demanded, his voice barely above a whisper. 

Bilbo considered the question for a moment, now looking rather unhappy himself. “Because… Well, I suppose it’s because I know better than you might imagine just what it feels like to lose the only place you feel you belong, and to be forced to go on living despite it. And you’ve lost that too. Your home, that is. It was taken from you. But I will help you get it back if I can.”

A moment of silence passed between them all, heavier than any of the ones that had come before it. 

“I cannot guarantee your safety.” Thorin said at last, his pained whisper unwavering. 

“I know.” 

“Though I must admit I feel responsible for your fate.” 

At this Bilbo looked slightly confused, and Gandalf at once began to dread the moment their new burglar perused the section of his contract that elaborated quite fastidiously on funeral arrangements. 

“And I yours, Master Oakenshield.” Bilbo said after collecting himself. 

The stormy look returned to Thorin’s face as quickly and thoroughly as it had left it. 

“You should not.” 

And with that, he turned his heel and left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope these updates are bringing a little light into your lives right now, because the great comments I've received so far here and on my Tumblr have made my day more than once! And don't let the idiocy of these two drag you down. It's a slow burn for a reason, but - but without spoiling anything - it's very likely that things probably might potentially work out for them, in theory.


	5. Chapter 5

A proper hero’s journey – Bilbo had always thought – was rather like writing a poem. For one thing, he was not particularly good at either but he insisted on doing them anyway. More to the point, however, was the fact that both were difficult to start properly, and both always seemed to end before he’d said everything he had wanted to. 

The morning of the first day of their adventure dawned as bright and cheerful as any before it. Or, at least, Bilbo assumed it did, as he’d quite slept through it. 

“Come now, Master Baggins!” the voice that awoke him shouted with muffled joy from behind the closed door of his bedroom. “We mean to leave soon, and Gandalf has warned us that you’ll be requiring two whole meals before we’re off if we’re to escape the dreadful wrath of hobbits.” 

It was Kili - of course it was, for who else could manage to be as cheerful as that while bearing such terrible news – and though Bilbo could hear his soft snickering at the thought of anything about a hobbit being dreadful at all, he had half a mind to give the young dwarf a sound bop over the head for daring to joke about mealtimes. 

Instead, however - and because it was morning after all – he only scratched his cheek with bleary annoyance, adjusted his nightgown so that it covered everything that was proper, and gave the young dwarf a stern glare when at last he vacated his rooms and made for wherever it was in his house that smelled of sizzling fat strips of bacon, and large fluffy blueberry muffins, and every other wonderful thing that made first and second breakfast two of his top six meals of the day. 

Logically enough his nose led him to the kitchen, where – though the majority of the dwarves would seem to already have eaten – Bombur was scurrying about tossing this pan and stirring that one, and generally filling the room entirely with his boisterous activity, though the only other person in it was Bifur besides. 

Bilbo sat at the small breakfast table next to Bifur, who was working steadily through a plate piled with eggs and sausage and seemed to be in no rush at all to finish it. 

“Ai-menu Duzhuk, Uz-Bushg,” Bifur said quite kindly, bless him, and though Bilbo had never been allowed to properly study the secret language of the dwarves he found that he knew that phrase quite well. 

At your service, Master Hobbit.

“And I at yours, Master Dwarf.” Bilbo replied without a thought, as was only polite. 

Bombur spun around in surprise when he heard it though, and Bilbo realized with dread that he had just made the first of what would likely be many months-worth of foolish slips. And though he’d never in both of his adult lives thus far had anything but respect and admiration for his parents, he found that in that brief moment he resented them for having brought him up so well and instilled in him such drattably impeccable manners. 

“I didn’t realize hobbits were familiar with Khuzdul, Master Baggins.” The cook said - with more joviality than accusation, for which Bilbo was very grateful. “Although most of my kind are rather under the impression it’s a secret, you know, so I think I can be forgiven for not suspecting it!” 

“Ah, yes, well….” Bilbo stalled. “Many hobbits know little of it, and in fact most know nothing at all. But a few times a year dwarven merchants will pass through the Shire as they travel from the Blue Mountains to Rohan and seek to use our bridges to ford the Brandywine River between…. and I do so enjoy a good dwarven story, so I will often stop and speak to them. I suppose in doing so I’ve picked up a small amount of your language, though I’ve exhausted almost all of it in this conversation already.” He concluded, before adding nervously: “I do hope you do not mind, it was not my intent to pry into your customs.” 

Bombur, he was relieved to note, did not seem to mind in the least, for he was a very modern sort of dwarf and not too easily swayed by the heavy command of tradition. “Not at all Master Burglar, not at all! You may wish to refrain from revealing that little fact to Thorin and Balin and the like - for your own sake, truly. They will not try you for it or anything so harsh, but they likely would not be too pleased.” He said, and as he spoke he flipped a griddlecake using the pan alone as if it were an easy accomplishment rather than one Bilbo had spent most of his twenties practicing. “I cannot fault you for enjoying a dwarven story, for they are among the loveliest to be found anywhere in my opinion.” Bombur continued, chatting away absentmindedly in a way Bilbo had always found endearing – as long as it meant no delay to his meal. “They contain none of the flowery nonsense of elven tales, nor the dreariness of men’s. And I suppose we are rather lucky that you enjoy them too, for we have little else but our pasts to tempt you from your front door at the moment… But, oh!” He jumped a little with excitement, “Of course! My brother Bofur often traveled that very route, and likely did others of our company besides. Perhaps you saw him, he’s the one you met last night with the rather enviable hat?” 

Bilbo only hummed noncommittally at the question and provided that perhaps he had. In truth, though, he rather doubted it. He had not lied in telling his friend that he often delighted in visiting with dwarven peddlers as they pushed their wares through his village, but he had omitted the fact that he’d almost entirely done it decades ago and still a year or two more in the future, after his return from Erebor. Nor did he disclose that he’d really only bothered because he so missed the dwarves that were currently bumbling around noisily in the hallways near him as they prepared to leave on their adventure. 

A plate piled high with a little bit of everything was then placed before him, breaking his reverie, and he was pleased to see that a second one followed. It seemed the majority of the food Bombur had been so ferociously fabricating had been for him.

“Your first and second breakfasts, Master Burglar.” The cook said, very obviously proud of his handiwork. “Master Gandalf warned us of your prolific appetite, and Balin has relayed to me Thorin’s own instructions to provide for your needs in the matter as best as we can, whenever we have the capacity for it.” 

Bilbo – though flattered by their concern - meant to interrupt him then, as he certainly didn’t need food half as much as the two dwarves among them who were still growing their first beards, and who were likely behind the suspicious thumping and knocking from the next room over (where he could only assume every unlocked drawer in his house was being rather rudely inspected). But before he even had the chance, Bombur continued to speak:

“I’ve clearly availed myself of your pantry, I hope you do not mind. Only, as I hear you’re to be joining us on this quest I fear most of it was fated to spoil otherwise.” 

“Of course not, Master Bombur.” Bilbo reassured him quickly. “You are perfectly welcome to anything in this house at all - for I’d much prefer you have it than my cousin Lobelia, who will come snooping about in search of my silverware if I am gone too long.” 

Bifur snorted at this, and through expression alone he was able to communicate to Bilbo that he understood the misfortunes of those possessing a cousin (for which he was swatted rather sharply with a dish towel across the shoulder by Bombur). 

Of course, that was when Thorin entered the room, and really Bilbo should have known that his second impression on the dwarf would hardly be better than the first. 

“A soft-willed grocer, and an encourager of mischief within his company, that’s what he thinks of me.” Bilbo thought peevishly. 

Luckily, Thorin reacted with only a single slightly-raised eyebrow, and instead focused on accepting the rest of the food which Bombur had piled onto a plate for him. A pity too, for the griddlecakes were delicious, and Bilbo likely would have eaten several more if there had been any left. 

“Ankaki astû, Master Burglar.” The king said as he took a seat at the table opposite Bilbo. 

This phrase Bilbo did not recognize, and quite unfortunately too, as it made every dwarf within earshot stop in their tracks and stare at the two of them in surprise. Even Gandalf – visible through the doorway to the parlor - raised his gaze from the stem of his pipe at hearing it, though he chose to continue puffing away and creating quite a cloud of smoke all over one of Bilbo’s nicest armchairs rather than comment. 

Thorin did not react to the behavior of his companions at all, and in fact it seemed he did not notice it. Instead he took several rather voracious bites of food, and a part of Bilbo bemoaned the fact that he was not even bothering to savor Bombur’s excellent cooking properly. 

“Good morning to you too, Master Oakenshield.” He replied at last, taking a careful stab in the dark as to what had just been said to him. “Lovely weather we’re having, is it not?” 

He hoped it was, at least. It certainly had been last time, but he hadn’t so much as looked out the window all morning, and at the moment he couldn’t possibly look anywhere else but at the dwarven king who didn’t seem the least bit interested in entertaining his small talk. 

After a moment’s-too-long a pause Thorin grunted in response, hardly breaking the steady flow of food into his mouth for long enough to swallow any of it. 

How lovely. 

Bilbo glanced at Bombur for some validation in his being nonplussed, but the only look he got back was an evaluative one, as if whatever short sentence Thorin had said had contained something that changed his opinion of the hobbit ever so slightly. 

“Oh dear,” Bilbo thought, “this can’t possibly be good.” 

**** 

Thorin quite liked to think of himself as a reasonable dwarf. 

In his younger days, he could admit, he had been rather bullheaded and passionate even by the standards of his people. His mother and father had teased him for it - though in the end his father had always said if he could learn to control himself they were attributes that would one day make him a great king, and his mother had said the same of his one day making someone a great husband. 

It pained him greatly that he had let them down on both counts. 

Regardless, he lost those instincts long ago, as they had burned in dragon fire along with nearly everything else that had given him value in this world. The Thorin who had led his surviving people through famine and misfortune as they wandered the wilderness in search of a new home was not the same Thorin who had once led his brother and sister in escaping their rooms and slipping past the royal guards one Durin’s day so they could join the dancing and festivities that were to take place long past their bedtime. Nor even was he the same Thorin who had led his people to attempted battle against the dragon when it had first cast its terrible shadow over their rightful home. 

In fact, the Thorin who walked through the little round door of Bag End the second time was not at all like the one who walked through it the first, and for that – at least - he was grateful. 

All this to say, though, that Thorin had been through far more in his first life than most, and he only expected further trials in his second. And though he hardly welcomed any such tribulation, he felt – with all the comfort that hindsight allows – that it had forged him into a reasonable and intelligent dwarf above all else. 

But for all his reasonableness and practicality, and for all that it hardly mattered now, he could not shake the haunting knowledge that he had died. 

He forgot it well enough in the daylight, when everything in the world sought to distract him at once, and he could quite easily bury his feelings beneath the endless layers of tasks and concerns that required his attention as the leader of their company. But the problem with burying things is that often they will grow, and he found that when darkness fell it only ever served to make everything he do not wish to see that much clearer. 

He could not forget it. It was not the sense of pain he had felt, which he was sure must have been significant, though he could now scarcely recall the sensation. But rather what haunted him was a deeper hurt, the tender scars of which could not so easily be lost by undoing their creation. 

He could not forget watching his young nephews so bravely run into danger at his request, only to perish for it. He could not forget having watched, entirely helpless in the matter, as he broke the poor hobbit’s heart for the second time in as many days. And he could not forget – selfish though it felt to linger on – that he truly had died then. 

He did not fear death then, nor did he now, and he had long since resolved in the period between awakening in this strange and far too familiar world and setting off on their quest that he would not shy from it again if it meant that those he loved would be protected. But having tasted death, he found that he did not want it. There was much he could yet do with this chance he had been given, much he still had yet to say, and the glorious death of a warrior on the battlefield was not so half tempting now as a simple life of taking care of those he loved, and even of allowing himself to be taken care of in return. 

It had been a realization that had shocked him, when he’d first had it, for it was contrary to his nature almost entirely. But he’d realized after some thinking that it was the very lesson Bilbo had been trying to teach him in the end. And Bilbo was right about everything. 

Still though - no matter how he tried to ignore it, or to resolve his feelings on the matter, or conquer the insubordinate impulses of his own mind - he found that he could not forget dying, and he could not forget every mistake he had allowed himself to make before he did so. 

And even if he distracted himself for long enough in his waking hours that he hardly had time to find his bedroll before he slept, his regrets and remorse surrounding the matter only followed him into his dreams. 

And so he thought on them still, day though it now was, as he and his company stood at the gate of Bilbo’s lovely garden and waited for him to finish the rather detailed letter of instructions regarding his home and assets which he apparently meant to leave with his gardener. The dreams Thorin had could not be called nightmares, if only because in truth they were merely memories. Though they were still what he most feared from his future, they were also only a most factual representation of his past, and he hardly even felt justified in dreading them as he went to sleep each night. They were, he privately thought, perhaps some small fraction of his penance for all the hurt he’d wrought. 

Regardless, he did not go so far as to insist to himself that he enjoy them, and last night’s had been particularly tormentous. As clearly as if he’d been living it all over rather than simply recalling it, he had found himself once more gifting the shirt of mithril to his beloved hobbit (who was now presently hammering a sign that said “No Esteemed Visitors Nor Sackville-Bagginses Permitted, See Hamfast Gamgee With All Inquiries” to his little wooden gate, and the dwarves around him all chuckled at the implied story behind it). 

The mithril shirt had been one of his greatest regrets, in looking back at all his foolish mistakes. Not in that Thorin had mourned the loss of one of the most valuable pieces in his treasury, in fact even at the time he had not questioned the decision for a moment. Rather, it was because the dwarrow did not give gifts lightly. A gift may be given between family members, or between very close friends, and certainly gifts were most expected during a courtship. But it was always the case that gifts were expressions of premeditated and very explicit care and devotion, and the act of giving a gift at all was far more meaningful to the dwarves than the actual item itself (though – especially in courtship – a truly impressive trinket never went amiss). 

So what Thorin did not regret was the value of the item in question, but rather the jealous and possessive nature with which he had offered it. It was disgraceful to him, to look back on it now. At the very moment when he ought to have expressed his love and admiration to his dear friend, he had instead expressed a dark and avaricious desire to somehow possess the poor burglar. His intentions had not been pure in the least, and - even worse – they had not been clear. For truthfully he had not wished to present a token of their friendship at all, and in the most reserved recesses of his heart he knew he had given the gift in courtship. But the covetousness of his gold-struck mind had not allowed him to say as much, for the all-encompassing fear of losing one of his greatest of treasures. And so he had remained silent, and had tainted the sacred act of gift-giving in doing so. 

And, as his dreams the previous night had so horribly reminded him, at the time he had not even been in the least ashamed of it. 

“It is a gift, a token of our friendship.” He had lied. “True friends are hard to come by.” 

He had held the hobbit by the arm then, and pulled him aside. And even at the time he felt he must have seen the growing fear in the hobbit’s face, though he rejected the notion before it had even been allowed to form fully in his mind. 

In reliving the experience, though - and in knowing that even as an army marched upon them and death had circled overhead like scavenging birds to a carrion feast, what Bilbo had feared had instead and quite rightfully been him - Thorin found that his inability to change the course of his dream was almost unbearable. 

“I have been blind, but now I am beginning to see… I am betrayed.” He had said still, for try as he might he could not do anything else. 

“Betrayed?” Bilbo had asked weakly. 

“The Arkenstone.” He had said, the name bitter on his tongue. “One of them has taken it. One of them is false.” 

Bilbo had plead with him then, when he should have left the mountain and all its accursed treasure and made for home. 

He had been a true friend, in those times now past. 

“Thorin,” he’d begun, and the king had savored the rare sound of his name from Bilbo’s lips so much he’d all but missed the rest of the sentence. “The quest is fulfilled, you’ve won the mountain. Is that not enough?” 

“Betrayed by my own kin.” He had replied, unwilling to see reason. 

“No,” Bilbo had insisted, “No, you… you made a promise to the people of Laketown. Is this treasure truly worth more than your honor? Our honor, Thorin. I was also there, I gave my word.” 

Our honor, he had said. Our honor, Thorin. 

Blind and foolish as he had been, Thorin had not listened to what the one he loved had said, but rather the words with which he had said it. 

Our honor. That is how Bilbo had put it. The honor which we share in, which – if Thorin had his way – they would continue to share in and accumulate until the day that death dared try to tempt them away, and perhaps even beyond that. 

“For that, I am grateful.” He had replied. “It was nobly done. But the treasure of this mountain does not belong to the people of Laketown. This gold is… ours. And ours alone.”

And truly, what greater metaphor was there for the unworthiness of Thorin’s love than that. First in offering a gift of armor, to protect the hobbit from dangers that he would not have faced at all were it not for Thorin. And then – through so many layers of pretense it could hardly be considered anything less than cowardly – in offering to share equally in all the riches of Erebor, which Bilbo did not want at all. 

Dwalin’s hand – solid as iron, and patting him roughly on the back – was what finally broke Thorin from his unhappy reverie, and he saw that Bilbo had long since finished his preparations to leave and was waiting with the rest of them for his command. And Gandalf, in particular, was looking at him with an open look of great amusement, drat the old fool. 

“We make for Bywater,” Thorin said at last, gathering himself into the leader he must be. “There we will gather supplies, and ponies if we can find them. By eleven o’clock – and no later – we will meet at a pub called the Green Dragon to begin our journey.” 

And with no more fanfare than that, their perilous adventure started.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nice long chapter for you all, enjoy!

There was much to fear in the months ahead, and no one could possibly understand that as well as Bilbo. 

And yet, despite this, he had for days now been able to think of little else beyond whatever it was that Thorin had said to him in the kitchen the morning they had departed. 

Bifur was, of course, incapable of helping, and was likely equally unwilling. And Bombur – even when asked multiple times, on multiple occasions, and with multiple attempts at nonchalance – had only told him that the phrase in particular was a bit more complicated and revelatory than the simple greetings Bilbo had managed to pick up, and was therefore outside the realm of his comfort in disclosing. 

Even Gandalf had been of little help, instead preferring to look smug and knowing when Bilbo felt confident the wizard likely as confused as he. But then that was hardly new. 

This had meant that Bilbo was forced to scout for more gullible interpreters, who might be willing to part with ancient cultural secrets for the chance to have something of interest to say. And that, of course, meant Fili and Kili. 

Unfortunately, the two were quite busy, for Thorin always seemed to require their muscle in accomplishing this task, or their esteemed wisdom and counsel in navigating that one. And it had been quite a deal too long for Bilbo to properly remember whether this had been the case at the start of their first journey, but even with his Valar-granted prescience in the matter he found it quite baffling. He loved the boys, truly, but they were hardly the strongest or smartest of their current bunch - if only because they had thus far been given less than half the years to have gained any such skills as the rest of their companions. It meant that Thorin was spending time with his nephews, however, so Bilbo could hardly find it in himself to grumble about it. 

Hardly, but not quite entirely. 

When at last he managed to separate the boys from their uncle and the rest of the company for long enough to have a proper conversation, they had already reached the burned and crumbling shell of what had once been a farmhouse, which regrettably signaled that the esteemed company of Bert, Tom, and William the trolls was not too far away. 

Thorin had, for his part, been quiet and moody from the moment they had awoken that morning – though Bilbo had wondered at the fact that he’d managed to notice the change at all, given how much less endearing the dwarf’s eternally foul mood was now that he once again found himself in its close proximity. Regardless, today he had seemed slightly gruffer and sullener, somehow or another, and the hobbit was thoroughly perplexed as to what unknown change could have prompted it. He was certain things had not been quite like this the first time around – for it had been the dwarf’s more vocal strain of annoyance that had been what inspired Gandalf to leave them so dreadfully and dangerously alone that day. 

Bilbo also, naturally, wondered whether he might have been the cause. He could not recall a single thing he had done to irk the king – in fact they had hardly stood on the same side of camp in all the days they had traveled together thus far. Thorin had seemed, if anything, even more content to ignore his existence entirely this time round – although perhaps it was only that it hurt Bilbo more to be the recipient of the dwarf’s disdain now that he knew how gentle the warmth of his companionship could be. 

But as he considered what could have possibly have altered their routine so noticeably in only the short time they’d been travelling, Bilbo realized that perhaps he was not the only thing that had changed in this world. In a universe where the most important decisions were as likely to be made with the flip of a coin as anything else, it could hardly be expected that the whims of fate and chance would perfectly recreate themselves a second time. 

Or could it? If only whatever disinterested deity that thrust him so roughly back into his own past in the first place had bothered to provide him a proper overview of the situation, he wouldn’t have to spend so much of his renewed time worrying about his hair growing in white roughly seventy years ahead of schedule. Even Lobelia Sackville-Baggins’ infamous make-it-yourself fruitcakes came with more extensive instructions than this, although they were only marginally less disturbing a gift to receive. 

But there was no point in working himself up over it, he supposed. And so he resigned himself to the fact that Thorin’s terrible mood was as likely to have been caused by a chain reaction triggered by the errant flap of a hummingbird’s wing a hundred miles away in Angmar as it was to have been caused by him. 

Determined not to worry about it – though not entirely confident in his ability to do so – it had only taken a mumbled complaint from Bombur about how mushrooms would greatly improve the fish stew he was preparing for their lunch for Bilbo to jump at the chance for some distraction. 

“I will find us some!” He had practically shouted, leaping up from the log where he had sat to wallow. “In fact, I would be willing to bet I could find us some morels, even!” 

Bombur, bless his heart, looked ecstatic at the idea, though most of the other dwarves within earshot had instead only adopted their own personal expressional cocktails of unimpressed confusion. 

Surprisingly enough, though, Bofur looked up from his whittling with excitement as well. “Morels?” He asked with interest, “Aren’t those the ones you used to serve us, Bombur? They’re as close to steak as you can get when you can’t afford the cow,” he then explained to Dwalin, the Ri brothers, and Gloin, who were all within earshot (as well as Oin, who was also there but was never within earshot of anything no matter how close he stood to it). And suddenly the dwarves, who had initially dismissed the idea of eating anything that came from the ground their preferred food walked on, looked at Bilbo with a renewed interest. Ori even removed a small leather-bound book from one of his many and varyingly frayed pockets, and began to scribble down a few notes. 

“The very same,” Bombur replied, clearly already devising the many delicious ways he could prepare such treats. “They’re notoriously difficult to find, which is why I saved them for special occasions as you’ll remember. Do you really think you could get us some, Bilbo?” 

“I can certainly try.” Bilbo said, “Although I’d prefer you didn’t quote me on that if I come back empty-handed. Still, it’s the right time of year of course, and the soil seems to be cool enough. And I could have sworn I saw some Dryad’s Saddle growing out of one of the logs we passed only a short way off, which is always a good sign… So yes, I believe I just might.” 

“We’ll help!” said Kili, springing into sight from out of nowhere with Fili close behind. 

“We’d love to help,” Fili added enthusiastically. “What is it we’re doing, exactly?” 

“Mushroom hunting.” Bilbo supplied, “But surely there’s something your uncle needs you for…” 

“Not a thing!” Kili said hurriedly, “He left camp a while ago to scout the area, and if we leave fast enough we’ll be gone before he gets back and comes up with anything. Quickly, quickly!” 

And practically dragging Bilbo by his elbows, the two princes escorted him away from their camp and into the shadowed woods that surrounded it. 

Affronted by being dwarf-handled so roughly, Bilbo communicated as much through a glare the moment they set him down, and he considered carefully the exact words with which he would lecture them while he fixed his clothing and re-tucked his shirt. But before he could properly lay into the two boys, he realized that this separation from their group would work very well indeed for his plans to discern whatever it was their uncle had said that had even Balin acting strangely around him. 

“Well now,” he began instead, the half-damp pine needles underfoot snapping and crunching as he gave a haughty stomp, “do you two even have the first idea what a morel mushroom looks like?” 

“Brown, I suppose,” Fili said with all the unconcerned confidence of an heir to a well-respected throne. 

“Probably grows in the ground,” Kili added, observing the generous scattering of trees around them with sage wisdom. 

“Yavanna save me from the uselessness of dwarves,” Bilbo grumbled. “Yes, they are brown, and you’ll have to look down to find them. But that is hardly all, it’s much more complicated than that…” He huffed a bit at the thought, wondering where to even begin. “They’re sort of oval-shaped, with a honeycomb texture. And we’re very lucky that there was clearly a small forest fire here recently, for morels love recent burns. Don’t repeat this information to anyone, mind you. A mushroom hunter’s secrets are ones they take to the grave, where I’m from. My grandfather Mungo was quite famous for the amount of morels he could scavenge every spring, and right up to his deathbed his children begged him to reveal his hunting spots, but of course he refused…” 

A Hobbit – when the subject of mushrooms was involved – could talk until they were blue in the face, and then some time besides. But Bilbo stopped then, for he noticed Kili and Fili were staring at him, clearly horrified. 

“He wouldn’t share where he found some silly old mushrooms?” Fili demanded in shock, “Not even with his own children? We dwarrow have our gold-sicknesses, but we would never deny our own kin over something so unimportant.” 

“Well wait just a moment,” Bilbo replied, a bit offended. “If you told a hobbit that your kind would betray each other over some unnecessarily extravagant pieces of jewelry and some pretty rocks most of us would be equally aghast, you know. A hobbit’s mushroom spots are as valuable to us as the secrets of your craft are to you, though you might not understand it. Anyway, my father begrudgingly admitted to me that he respected the old man’s secretiveness on the matter, though he did not mimic it. I learned everything I know from him, which is how I can tell you that we’re likely to be lucky today, for the oak leaves around us are about the size of mouse’s ears, and that is a good sign.” 

Fili and Kili seemed to have been somewhat convinced by Bilbo’s insistence on the importance of what they considered to be boring old toadstools, and their expressions returned to the glazed looks of disinterested confusion they had worn since he’d first begun talking to them. 

“Oh never mind,” Bilbo grumbled, “you two are hopeless. I can see I could tell you every one of my scavenging tricks without any fear they’d be spread around, for I have no doubt you’ve already forgotten everything I’ve already said. Just look underneath any fallen trees you come across, and if you find anything round that doesn’t look like a rock just bring it to me so I can identify it.” 

And – for the moment forgetting his quest to decipher the actions of their uncle in his annoyance – Bilbo left the two princes to stumble about uselessly in the woods while he set his mind to more important matters. 

Once, quite literally a lifetime ago, Bilbo had read a respectable amount of the books in the extensive library of Rivendell, and he had learned a thing or two about elves and their traditional practices of meditation. Similarly, what felt like many lifetimes further away, Thorin had once told him of the dwarrow and their love of exercise for the sake of exercise itself. Bilbo had hardly believed it – especially not when he was then so cozily and comfily wrapped in his blanket by the fire, with Thorin sitting so close to him that every brush of their shoulders contained more heat than any of the sparks that crackled and extinguished as they rose with the smoke and into the night sky to mingle with the stars. As the rest of the company slept around them, Thorin had quietly divulged that to the dwarves there were few moments of greater internal peace to be achieved than in pushing their bodies far beyond what was merely comfortable, seemingly for no other reason at all. 

Hobbits, of course, were not tempted by either activity in the least. But if there was any equivalent of such meaningful mindfulness to be found in the Shire it was likely to be mushroom hunting, and as Bilbo searched and rooted among the damp foliage that clung to the ground he reveled in the comfortable sense of his thoughts slipping in and out of his mind with such ease that it felt they were only passing through on their way to somewhere far more important. 

And so, for a long while, he thought of nothing at all. But as it always had done when it had nowhere to rest, his mind led him back to Thorin. 

Thorin, who had gone off scouting so near to where their company would face their first peril, and perhaps Bilbo ought to be a bit more worried about that… It was still fully daylight and would yet be for hours, which meant the trolls would not dare to venture from their cave. But that did not guarantee that Thorin would not venture into it, nor did Bilbo have the least bit of faith in Thorin’s ability to find his way back to them if he got even the slightest bit lost. 

Oh, why hadn’t he at least taken Dwalin with him? The foolhardy oaf, if Thorin got himself hurt before they’d even properly begun their quest Bilbo would never forgive himself. He shouldn’t have let the king out of his sight, what on earth had he been thinking? 

In truth, he ought to have been more concerned with the trolls in general, he now realized. But with the great and terrible context of all the trials that lay ahead of them, this singular incident at the beginning of their quest had quite paled in comparison. Why should his friends have anything to fear from three lumbering and stupid trolls when they would face down armies of goblins and orcs with such courage and competence so near in the future. Of course, they had their issues incapacitating the three great ugly beasts the first time around, but in reflecting on it afterward it had seemed to be nothing but a helpful trial run in which they’d learned their own strengths and weaknesses as a team. And so, in preparing for the journey, Bilbo’s rather extensive list of notes and self-reprimands and warning reminders had only touched on the encounter with the trolls long enough to enumerate the following:   
1\. Keep Gandalf around.  
2\. Don’t get used as a handkerchief. 

Now, though, with all the clarity and cowardice that accompanies actually being put in a situation you were once so confident you could handle, Bilbo worried for them all – and mostly for Thorin. 

He had almost worked himself up into a proper fret by the time Fili and Kili came running up to him, their traveling cloaks bunched together to form makeshift bags which were clearly stuffed full of their findings. 

“Bilbo, we’ve f- Bilbo, are you quite alright? You look as if you’re expecting to be attacked.” Fili questioned, seeming very much concerned, and casting his eyes around with wary confusion to discover what could possibly have his friend so frightened in the idyllic and well-lit little grove they were occupying. 

“Oh, no, perfectly fine.” Bilbo reassured them a bit too quickly. “Just… missing home, is all.” And he went to sit on the stump of a fallen tree, to gather his nerves a bit. “Now, what have you boys found?” 

The two princes seemed to accept his excuse, though it clearly made them a bit sad to hear it. But they dumped the contents of their cloaks roughly on the ground in front of him with quite a bit of pride regardless. 

“Feast your eyes,” Kili said with a grin, “it would seem we are morsel-hunting prodigies.” 

“Morel,” Bilbo corrected absentmindedly as he slid from his seat to kneel on the comfortingly cool ground and began to sort through their pile, which had a wide assortment of both genus and quality. “Ah, we have a few diamonds in the rough here, it would seem. A few true morels, well done boys… And some oyster mushrooms as well, those are also quite good… This one is just a rock, I hope you realize that… Ah, you didn’t eat any of these before you showed them to me, did you?” 

“Eat them?” Demanded Fili, “Why in Durin’s name would we do that? Mushrooms taste of mud!” 

“No they don’t,” Bilbo replied steadily. “Mud tastes of mud, and when you leave the mud on your mushrooms instead of cleaning them off properly so will they. But it’s a good thing you didn’t realize that regardless, for it would seem we’ve got some false morels here… and some LBMs as well, both of which are poisonous.” 

This was, for whatever reason, what interested the two dwarves the most, after all the family scavenging secrets Bilbo had divulged to them. It figured. 

“Poisonous?” Asked Kili, just as Fili chimed in with “LBM, what does that mean?” 

“Quite poisonous,” Bilbo explained, a bit entertained by their ridiculous priorities in the matter. “And LBM is just a well-versed mushroom hunter’s acronym for Little Brown Mushroom, which are a variety of little growths that can be found in abundance just about anywhere, and are so similar to each other it’s no use bothering to try to tell them apart. Many of them are poisonous enough that a single cap can kill a creature as big as a man, much less us hobbits and dwarves, and so we avoid them altogether.” 

“What’s false about our morels, then?” demanded Kili. “They look quite good enough to me.” 

“Well see here, they look similar to the true morels you found, sure enough.” Bilbo pointed out, turning over an example so they could examine it more closely. “But they’re not quite as symmetrical, and the cap is shaped more like… well, like the lobes of a brain than like a honeycomb, I suppose that’s the analogy that would make the most sense to you lot.” The boys nodded. “And if I’m right… here, Master Fili, lend me a knife.” 

Almost as soon as he’d thought to ask for one, a knife appeared in his hand, and Bilbo remembered then how heavily armed his friends always were, even the young ones. Truly, they were an odd sort. 

“If we cut into it, right down the middle,” he continued, “we will find that a true morel is hollow, while a false morel is full of cotton. Ah, see? I was right.” 

And sure enough, the mushroom in question was filled with a wispy substance on the inside, which the two young dwarves leaned dangerously close to examine. 

“Will this kill you as well, then? Even just a small amount?” Kili asked. 

“Yes,” said Bilbo carefully, “But only if you eat it. A small amount might only make you very sick, but I don’t know just what dosage that would require, so you really ought to think twice before you try to prank Master Dwalin with it.” 

Kili and Fili both looked shocked for a moment, before they broke into the matching and quite charming smiles that had always served them so well in getting their way with everyone but Thorin, Bilbo, and their mother. 

“Now Bilbo, why on earth would you ever suspect such a thing?” Kili asked sweetly. 

“Impressive that you did, I have to admit.” Fili added. “It seems our little burglar is more perceptive than he lets on.” 

“Yes, well, I think I’ll be keeping all of these, just to be safe.” Bilbo replied, entirely unimpressed, and he tucked the dangerous mushrooms into a separate pocket of the little foraging bag he had luckily thought to bring with him. “I had a question I wanted to ask you boys, by the way. I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.” 

“Oh yes, anything.” Kili said. 

“If it is within our power.” Fili added, with a bit more presence of mind. 

“Oh, it is nothing too large.” Bilbo said, dusting the clinging leaves and dirt from his knees as he stood, and doing his best to feign only the most casual of interest. “Only your uncle said something to me at breakfast, and I was so focused on my meal that I quite missed it, so I was wondering if you might be able to tell me what you think it was.” 

“Ah,” said Fili, his expression closing off a tad. “That we may not be able to do.” 

“Whyever not?” Bilbo pressed. “Surely you heard about it, for it seems to be the subject of some gossip everyone but myself is in on.” 

The two dwarves looked a bit guilty at hearing that Bilbo had noticed that. “Even so,” Kili said. “It’s not so much that we don’t want to as that we really shouldn’t.”

“We oughtn’t, in fact!” Fili chimed in helpfully.

“Exactly,” Kili continued. “It’s not about not telling you the meaning of the words, it’s about not telling anyone.” 

“And Balin would probably skin us alive if we went around teaching you Khuzdul, although the look on his face if you ever used it might almost be worth it.” Fili said, consideringly. 

“Well it’s not like you’d be teaching me actual Khuzdul, really.” Bilbo continued to urge, even as his internal Bagginsishness pleaded that it was impolite to push the matter. “I don’t have the foggiest recollection of what the words he said even sounded like, I just know that he said them and everyone reacted strangely. So you wouldn’t be telling me anything about the language, truly, you’d just be saying something in Westron, which isn’t a secret language at all.” 

It was a weak and almost nonsensical argument, but it seemed close to working judging by their considering expressions, and so he pressed on. 

“Why don’t I make you boys a deal,” he offered. “I don’t like feeling left out, so I want to know what’s happening here. But you boys don’t want to reveal an old cultural secret of yours, which I can understand. So let’s make a trade. You tell me the meaning of that one little phrase, and I’ll tell you a cultural secret of my own to make us even. Well, not exactly of my own, but actually a rather embarrassing one I happen to know about the elves.” 

This caught their attention well enough, and after only a moment of silent conversation through eye contact and various facial expressions alone, the two young dwarves turned to Bilbo with gleeful looks about them. 

“You have yourself a deal,” Fili said. 

“But you must go first,” said Kili, “so that we know everything is in order.” 

“Yes, of course,” Bilbo agreed. “Well, because you two are now experts in mushrooms, I can tell you the following secret involves them too. Have you two ever seen those red mushrooms with white spots that will sometimes grow on the forest floor?” 

The two dwarves nodded, clearly not yet seeming sold on the idea that whatever Bilbo had to say was going to be in the least bit interesting. 

“Well they are mildly poisonous themselves, so don’t go eating them,” Bilbo elaborated. “But it’s not the sort of poison that will kill you, it only makes you very sick. And, in fact, when prepared the right way they contain a hallucinogenic quality... They make you see things.” He clarified, for the boys did not seem to be clinging to his every word as he had hoped. “It’s the way the elves prepare them that’s the secret, though. What they do is they feed the mushrooms to a deer, then they wait for it to digest them… then they collect its urine and they drink it.” 

There was a pause in the conversation then, as the two young dwarves seemed to need a moment to internalize the information they’d just been given. 

“Its urine… you mean its piss?” Fili suddenly demanded in shock, while Kili began to laugh almost uncontrollably all at once. 

“Load of tree-shagging piss-drinkers, is what they are!” Kili said between great howls of laughter, and this time it was Fili’s turn to cackle at the thought. 

Bilbo, privately, thought there were plenty of elements of dwarven cuisine that were equally abhorrent to him, and that it was hardly fair to judge. But those sorts of thoughts were not going to get him the information he wanted, and so he kept them to himself. 

“Well,” he said, when he’d allowed them several more minutes of childish jokes on the matter and was more than ready for his repayment. “A deal is a deal, and I’d say you got what you wanted out of me. Now tell me what your uncle meant before I march right up to him and demand an explanation myself.” 

This sobered the two up rather quickly, it seemed. 

“No, definitely don’t do that,” Fili urged. “He wouldn’t take as kindly to any prying questions about our language as we would. We’re much sweeter than him, after all.” 

“Much sweeter,” Kili agreed (although it was likely the two were not entirely aware of just how sweet the king could be). 

“You are right, though,” Fili continued solemnly. “A deal is a deal, and so we shall tell you. What uncle said to you that morning was… well obviously we can’t repeat it, we’re just telling you the Westron for it after all. But basically translated it only means ‘I look at you’…” 

“I assume that’s not all it means, though?” Bilbo demanded, so far only more puzzled than he had been before. 

“No, not exactly,” Fili admitted. “It’s not so much about the actual meaning of the words as the cultural meaning of them, I suppose you could say. It’s an extremely formal greeting, one you only use for people who deserve your great respect. So being as Thorin is our king he’s on the receiving end of it quite a bit, but I don’t know that any of us have ever actually heard him use it.” 

“He didn’t mean any insult by it, I’m sure,” Kili rushed to add. “Of course, some people will say it sarcastically to their friends - and actually it’s also considered very romantic when you say it to someone you love, so it’s in a lot of our best poems. The context when it’s used really means a lot.” 

“And it was a bit surprising when he said it to you…” Fili said, clearly still as confused as the rest of them no matter how well he knew his own uncle. “Meaning no offense, of course, for you’re a wonderful little hobbit and a good traveling companion besides. But you are just a regular old halfling, you know. And according to Balin, Thorin never used to say that to any of the old dwarf lords of Erebor, for even they were beneath him.” He paused, seeming to consider the oddity of it all for a moment, before pressing on. “Still, Thorin surely only meant that you are highly esteemed after allowing us into your house and feeding us and agreeing to help us in our journey at great risk to yourself,” Fili concluded. “He was setting an example for the rest of us. Not that we all thought poorly of you without him getting involved, of course. You made us such excellent food that even Dwalin seemed to be considering proposing to you right on the spot. But he was just… setting a tone, I suppose you could say.” 

“Well if I’m as highly esteemed as all that…” Bilbo demanded, finding that he was for some reason more peeved than anything else now (though Fili’s referring to him as a halfling, and especially as a regular old one, certainly hadn’t helped)… “If I’m apparently so highly regarded by the king under the mountain, then why has he been so obviously avoiding me from the offset?” 

The two princes actually looked a bit uncomfortable, when Bilbo mentioned that. 

“Yes, well,” Kili began, “we’ve been wondering that too, you see. He’s not the most welcoming of outsiders, I’m sure you can understand that given everything he’s been through…” 

“But he asks after you quite a bit,” Fili added, his clear confusion only deepening, “which is ridiculous because very often you’ll be only a few yards away. If he actually wanted to inquire after your health he’d only have to raise his voice to do so, and we keep telling him as much…” 

“But he only tells us we are too young to understand,” Kili said “which is really rather rude. We’re young, but we’re not dwarflings. We’ve been able to talk perfectly well for several decades at this point, so it’s not like simple conversations are beyond us.” 

“Hmmph.” Bilbo grunted, thoroughly perplexed and equally aggravated with the behavior of the dwarf he had so stupidly chosen to fall in love with. Not for the first time, he cursed his foolish heart, and the even greater fool who had captured it. “Well I must admit I’m relieved to hear I haven’t been outright insulted by him, but I’ll have you know if your uncle behaved that way in the Shire he’d be considered rather rude.” 

“Oh not to worry,” Kili replied cheerfully, “our mother says the very same thing all the time. She has told him on several occasions that he’s lucky to be king or nobody would ever want to marry him.” 

“Not that he’s likely to marry regardless.” Fili commented offhandedly. “But that is another matter.” 

“Now wait just a moment,” demanded Bilbo – for although he had resigned himself to never being the object of Thorin’s affections long before the dwarf had ever died in his arms, he still was not half so bitter as to wish that the king never found happiness with anyone at all. “Why on earth would you say something like that?” 

“I don’t say it, our mother does.” Fili explained. “He insists, because he has two strong and suitable heirs and doesn’t like to risk any instability to the throne, that he won’t bother to marry for anything less than a true and complete love. Sees it as a waste of his time and the kingdom’s, or so he claims anyway.” 

“According to our mother, he’s pigheaded oaf who’s likely already met his One and ignored them entirely out of fear of getting his heart broken.” Kili concluded with a cheerful grin. 

“Well, as amusing as her phrasing is, I must admit I can’t fault your uncle for that,” Bilbo said honestly, as he began to steer them once more toward camp, realizing with the length of time they’d be gone their lunch must almost be ready, mushrooms or no. “There are few things that hurt more, or hurt for longer, I can tell you that much.” He continued absentmindedly. 

“Then you’ve experienced it?” Fili asked with some interest. 

“Oh, certainly.” Said Bilbo. 

“More than once? Do hobbits not have Ones?” Kili wondered. 

“No, only the one time.” Bilbo replied, not entirely eager to delve into the subject, but now realizing he’d walked himself right into it and hardly had a choice. “Most hobbits view love a bit differently from dwarves and elves, who can love only once. We’re similar to men in our approach, although we do not share their penchant for infidelity nor their custom of divorce. Falling out of love is uncommon for my people, as love itself is so deeply ingrained in our worldview and culture, but it’s not unusual for a hobbit to remarry after the death of their spouse, or for hobbits to court a number of people before they settle down and marry one. As for me, I have loved only the once. And once was more than enough for me, I’m afraid... Here,” and there he stopped them, for they had reached the edge of camp and the delicious smells of Bombur’s now near-finished cooking were already drifting to them with every other shift in the breeze. “Why don’t you two take some of these mushrooms and give them to Bombur over there. I’m keeping some for myself, since I rather think I’ve earned it. But tell him he’s welcome to those morels, and that the oysters will cook up similarly if he’s not familiar with them.” 

“But where are you going?” Kili demanded to know. 

“Just on a bit of a walk, I think I’d like to stretch my legs before I’m banished back to that accursed saddle again.” Bilbo said vaguely, with a reassuring smile. 

The boys did not question him, and instead accepted the handful of toadstools Bilbo gave them with no complaint before running off – no doubt eager to tell the rest of the dwarves what they had just learned about the elves they so ridiculously disliked. 

And so, casting his eyes around the camp once more and catching no sign of Thorin, Bilbo went off into the woods in search of the lost king.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well done to those of you who guessed what Thorin said... And thank you all as always for the comments and kudos, receiving the email notifications for them throughout my day always brings me joy. Hope you're doing well through all the craziness!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here I though the last chapter was long....

Thorin was not lost, he was just wandering a great deal more than he had intended to. 

To be lost implied a failure in one’s objective, and given that he hadn’t planned to get anywhere specific he certainly hadn’t failed in doing so. 

Admittedly, though, this unfamiliar grove had not been where he had imagined himself ending up. 

He had felt the weight of the day ahead of him from the moment he woke up that morning, knowing – as he did – exactly the sort of company they’d be keeping by the end of it. To make matters worse, this kind of all-encompassing stress was just the sort of thing he’d once learned to rely on Master Baggins for, as his presence alone – even devoid of the level of affection which Thorin burned at the very thought of invoking – seemed enough to calm the darkest of storms. 

Unfortunately, even the mutual reliance of friendship was exactly the sort of the thing Thorin was certain it would be best to avoid, in the long run. And so he had nothing else to do but to spend the entirety of their ride to the charred and crumbling farmhouse that marked their next camp steeped in an unhappy silence. 

The silence, at least, allowed him time to plan – for he considered their unavoidable encounter with the trolls to be a sort of introductory hurdle to their quest. One which, if they could not conquer it well, would bode very poorly for their chances of success in later endeavors. 

And though they had managed to defeat the trolls the first time around, it had been barely by the finest hairs of their chins, and with a good deal of help from Bilbo and that damnable wizard besides. Theirs had not been the triumphant and well-won success it easily could have been, if only they had approached the situation with any modicum of intelligence at all rather than rushing in headfirst at the merest glimpse of their burglar in peril. And this did not inspire confidence in Thorin, no matter how prepared he might be for the encounter now. He would not be Thorin Oakenshield – son of Thráin, son of Thrór, of the long and noble line of Durin – King Under the Mountain, Lord of Silver Fountains, He of Carven Stone, who took twelve dwarrow and a little hobbit off to reclaim his homeland and got them eaten by three blundering trolls within a fortnight. 

No, it was best he dispatched the trolls quickly, and on his own. It would be a significant task, for such enormous beasts were not defeated quite so easily as all that, and he had considered taking Dwalin along before deciding that the suspicion he would arouse in his good friend at his insistence that they patrol so long and in such specific an area hardly felt worth the extra axe. Still, a challenge though it would be, it was the least he could do to begin to make reparations to this small tribe of his friends he held so dear – who at the moment were now safely clustered together back at camp, sharing a delicious lunch, he was sure, and with no idea they’d ever been wronged by him. 

Besides all that, facing the trolls alone meant that they risked no harm to Fili and Kili, nor to Bilbo – who at the best of times was a terrifyingly soft and vulnerable target, but now, at the beginning of their journey, was yet entirely unspoiled by the terrible and polluting grip of conflict and war. 

If Thorin had his way, he would keep the burglar so for as long as he possibly could. Forever was too much to ask, he realized, especially when he had so selfishly allowed Bilbo to join them on their dangerous quest in the first place. But for today, and for every day after, he would beg that the darkness come tomorrow. 

And so it was that Thorin found himself wandering, a touch aimlessly, through a grove that looked to him to be identical to every one he had passed through before it, though he had the strangest feeling they were not the same. The trees were different, for one thing, for he had long since passed through the more densely forested region where thick brown trunks rose like towers into grand and reaching branches with dense green-needled growths. Instead, the woods that now surrounded him were comprised largely of trees that were white as a clean sheet, with odd brown blemishes on their trunks that resembled eery and unblinking eyes. There were other markings among them as well, carved intermittently but with very clear intent into the easily-scarred wood. Largely, they were the names of various men – for elves would never dare to deface any growing thing, and dwarves and wizards and the like would never bother. Most were written rather clumsily in the common Westron, though a few appeared to be Rohirric in origin, if Thorin remembered his childhood studies correctly. Occasionally the names appeared in pairs, with a heart or an arrow carved near them, which he assumed must denote a romantic coupling. 

He wondered, vaguely, if hobbits were the type to engrave their passions into a tree thus. He could easily imagine a younger and more carefree Bilbo taking some ridiculously small pocket knife of his to the forest to eternalize his fancy for another lucky halfling. But he could just as easily imagine him being horrified at the very idea of vandalizing the natural world for what he might consider to be no good reason at all. 

Thorin resolved to ask his friend himself when this was all over, and when friends they could finally be. And so he added it to the long mental list he kept of similar questions, which he imagined – smiling distractedly as he continued on into the confusingly nondescript glen before him – would only continue to grow and grow the longer he knew Bilbo, and couldn’t possibly be completed if he found himself lucky enough to know the burglar for another five lifetimes still. 

It was this foolish preoccupation that led Thorin to make what was the simplest mistake any adventurer could possibly commit… He did not watch where he was going. 

One moment he was walking alongside his sweet daydreams of a far distant future, as he followed the downward slope that cut through the foggy ridgelines around him like a knife through an apple. And the next he found that the forest floor below – covered with an eternal blanket of fallen leaves, where there was no one to sweep them away, and crunching with damp bark and the soft tearing of moss under every step he took – was suddenly and abruptly wrenched from him. 

As he gathered his scattered wits and took stock of his situation, he found that he was suspended at his feet by a long length of stiff and wiry rope. It looked to be an enormous version of the simple rabbit snare Bifur often set at each of their new camp sites, which had fed them quite well many more times than one. This iteration, however, was not only larger and far thicker, but was rather smelly, and covered with stains of a variety of colors – the origins of which Thorin preferred not to ponder. 

It was, first and foremost, mortifying. He, a fabled dwarven king, already the subject of legends, fooled by the same trick as a soft woodland animal. 

It was also painful, and more than slightly dangerous a situation to find himself in. Not only was there certainly some enormous hunter out there to match this trap, who – especially given Thorin’s strong suspicions as to their identity – would likely not be at all put off by the thought of consuming dwarf flesh. But there was also the blood that was already rushing thunderously to his head and crashing like waves around his ears, which made his attempts to think his way out of his predicament – before he was killed or simply died of the shame – rather difficult. 

His knife was somewhere on the forest floor, many perilous feet below him, having fallen uselessly from its scabbard the moment he was turned upside down. And his war hammers were similarly lost, to the extent that he couldn’t even see them when he used his limited range of motion to search. Though what he would do with a blunted war hammer at a time like this, he didn’t quite know, he still cursed them for having abandoned him in such a time of need. Orcrist would not have fallen from him so easily, he was sure. But the sword was still buried below ground in a cave only miles from him now, no doubt awash with the roiling stench of the three greasy and gruesome trolls that slept ungratefully by its side. 

After a few moments of debate, he eventually resigned himself to calling for help, though he was almost grateful at the realization that he was likely far too distant from any of his companions for them to hear his pitiful cries. Were Dwalin to find him like this he’d almost certainly end up wishing that the dwarf had been Bert or William or Tom instead, if only because they would have ended his suffering so much more quickly. 

He swung uselessly, his arms stiff at his sides – for he refused to resign himself to dangling quite as helplessly as he felt just yet, though they were already starting to lose their feeling at the fingertips. And he felt every bit as ridiculous as the wind chimes of the Shire he had only days ago found so baffling, for every change of the breeze sent him swinging this way and that, to the point that he once or twice had to cushion himself from crashing face-first into one of the odd pale trees that surrounded him. 

Even their timber was useless and confusing to Thorin, for the wood was far too soft to grapple with, and though he made a few attempts when he got near enough – all but hugging the trunks desperately in his efforts to scale them to safety – his fingers found no purchase on their smooth papery bark, and their thin and shivering limbs were yet too far above him to reach. 

He was a dwarf, of course, and this meant that he would not give up so easily. 

But he was a dwarf, of course, which meant he was not half so flexible as to be able to reach his own toes and untie himself, for all the strength he possessed that might have made it possible. 

Just as well, he considered with great annoyance, for the fall might have killed him anyway. 

It was an absolutely ridiculous situation, and he bemoaned his own incompetence with a terrible scowl as he turned slow circles at the whims of the wind. 

He continued to call for aid, his own voice echoing strangely through the trees and off the canyon walls where the silence that greeted him offered little hope. And he wriggled ineffectually at intermittent points, just to allow himself the feeling that he had any idea of control at all over his current position. 

It was ages and ages later - long after he’d let his arms drop to dangle below his head with a huff of resignation, and even after the sensation had returned to them and he felt the annoying tickle of his long hair on his palms whenever it caught the breeze – that he at last received a response. 

“Hello!” He called out, his voice now gravelly and hoarse, where hours ago it had boomed proudly through the gully with the almighty power of a landslide.

“Hello?” a higher and much kinder voice answered back. “Master Oakenshield, is that you?” 

Oh Mahal, it was Bilbo. Of all the mortifying options at his disposal…. He would have taken Dwalin and the three trolls all at once, and his long-dead and easily unimpressed father besides, over this. 

Still, though, he could hardly hide himself now. 

“Yes, Master Burglar.” He responded, doing his best to maintain a sense of dignity in his tone despite his unfortunate circumstances. “Why are you out here? You are no warrior, and these lands are not safe to wander alone.”

He heard the hobbit sigh softly with annoyance at his response, which meant that he must be close. 

“I came looking for you, if you must know,” Bilbo called out to him peevishly. “You oughtn’t wander alone yourself, you realize, and lunch has certainly come and gone at this point, with neither of us there to enjoy it.” 

Thorin smiled a bit in spite of his predicament, as Bilbo’s tone made it so blatantly obvious that the hobbit was more put out at the thought of a missed meal than anything else. Or he believed he smiled, though with his upturned polarity the sensation was even more unfamiliar to him than it ever was. 

“Where are you, anyhow?” the hobbit demanded, and he sounded very near now. 

“I, um…” Thorin began, certain his embarrassment would be quite plain on his face if it weren’t likely already beet red with the pull of gravity. “You might try looking up, Master Baggins.” 

“Looking up? I- oh goodness gracious me, Thorin!” his burglar exclaimed, and even through the pounding in his ears Thorin did not quite miss the normally so formal hobbit’s slip in using his first name. “How did you get up there? No, never mind, it’s a wonder you’re still conscious. How long have you been up there? I must find a way to get you down, but how?” 

“Peace, Master Burglar.” Thorin said loudly, in an attempt to cut off Bilbo’s nervous chatter before he got himself too excited. “We dwarrow are made of stronger stuff than you halflings, I am perfectly well.” 

The turbulent nausea of his stomach clearly did not agree with this assertion, but he pressed on. 

“If you would find some way of freeing me, you would be welcome to consider me in your debt.” Thorin offered, though he could not quite allow himself to forget that he was deeply indebted to the hobbit regardless. 

“In my… Oh don’t be ridiculous,” Bilbo grumbled, the sound of his voice now coming from directly below Thorin’s head. “In my debt indeed. You can just ask for help without being half so dramatic about it, you know…” he continued, and he further grouched and mumbled indiscernibly about dwarven pride and the foolishness of kings as the sound of rustling somewhere below indicated that he was ostensibly searching for a way to free his dangling companion. 

Unfortunately, the foggy administrations of Thorin’s blood-addled brain and Bilbo’s harried attempts to free him from his pitiful prison meant that neither of them noticed as the sun faded all too quickly in the distance. All at once, the jagged wind-carved valley in which they stood was bathed in a warm golden light that brought a beautiful life to everything it touched – though the moment was fleeting, and neither of them was at all aware enough to enjoy it. 

And with the passing of the sun, the light around them turned blue and cold, before in a matter of minutes it was extinguished completely. 

Thorin noticed the change, finally, when he opened his eyes after having kept them closed for a while in an attempt to keep the nausea at bay, and found that there was scarcely a difference in his darkened vision for having opened them at all. 

He was about to say as much to Bilbo, when the hobbit interjected with fears of his own. 

“Oh dear…” came the soft voice below him. “Master Oakenshield, I’m afraid I’m going to have to drop you. I’ve been trying to devise a gentler way of going about this, but I haven’t found one, and with the darkness I fear there’s a great many things in these woods we’d rather not face by ourselves. Oh, confound and confusticate it all…” he griped, before trailing off into worried muttering once more. 

Thorin found that he did not have it in himself to even think of complaining at his proposed mistreatment, and this was not only because thinking itself was rather hard at the moment. The darkness that had enshrouded them meant that every gust of wind which once had been nothing but an enormous annoyance now instead meant a strange and unknowable rustling of leaves and snapping of branches which surrounded them on all sides. And in the dark, of course, every boulder or particularly large tree becomes the shadowy outline of a troll. 

“Do what you must, Master Hobbit,” Thorin said, though the timbre of his voice had by then become barely distinguishable from a groan. 

“Right then,” Bilbo replied nervously, and an even greater rustling came from below him as the burglar made his preparations for whatever plan he had in store. “Right,” he said again, this time clearly more to himself than to Thorin. 

It was quite possible that Thorin slipped momentarily from consciousness just then, for he was never entirely clear as to the sequence of events which happened next. One moment he was made aware – from what little he could see of his hobbit out of the corner of his eye, as the wind continued to spin him in merciless circles – that Bilbo was going to attempt to climb the tree… But before he could warn him that it wasn’t even possible, he found that he was now facing another direction entirely, and was at eye level with the deep red of the burglar’s favorite wine-colored jacket, which was clear even in the darkness due to the dramatic contrast it provided with the bone-white bark of the trees as they shone in the moonlight. Thorin was glad to see the little coat had survived the journey so far, for he knew how much Bilbo loved it. But how on earth was it so high above the ground, he wondered… And it was then he realized that Bilbo himself was up there in the treeline with him, and therefore quite far away from the relative safety of the forest floor. 

“Master… Baggins,” he began a bit weakly “you should not...” 

“Should not what, Thorin?” Bilbo snapped impatiently, and there was his first name again… “Would you rather I leave you up here to dangle like a treat for the next wild animal that comes along? There are orcs out here too, I’m sure. Or trolls…” 

Bilbo was right of course, and in fact Thorin’s stomach twisted with something that was entirely unlike the illness he’d been feeling for the last hour or so when he realized that in this instance Bilbo was even more right than he knew. 

“You can’t… climb-” he continued his protest, though he was as fully aware as he was capable of being at the moment just how futile it was. 

“I think you’ll find that I can,” Bilbo responded, with a tone of voice that now suggested he was speaking to child who was behaving ridiculously rather than one of the great dwarven kings. “We hobbits aren’t particularly fast climbers, given how far out of our reach most branches tend to be. But we more than make up for it with our ability to keep from falling from of a tree once we’ve gotten up it. In fact,” he continued absentmindedly, as he scaled a bit higher and began to reach for the branch from which Thorin was so undignifiedly suspended, “in the summer months you can hardly find a forest from Westmarch to Bree that isn’t entirely overrun with young hobbits, if you only look upward. Ah, here we go…” 

Thorin strained his neck with great effort just to twist himself into a position where he could watch Bilbo’s shadowed movements, and when he managed it he saw that there above him his hobbit had managed to make his way across the branch that now held the weight of them both, and was sitting with his legs on either side of it as calmly as you please while he worked the very knife Thorin had lost to the forest floor at the start of this whole ridiculous endeavor through the rope that now trapped him. 

And then, suddenly, he wasn’t there anymore. 

Thorin blinked blearily in confusion, wondering if he’d lost consciousness once more, or if Bilbo had fallen somehow, though he had not heard a thud. 

“Bil-” he began quickly, only to be interrupted by the phlegmatic rumble of a voice he knew and despised in equal measure. 

“What’s this we ‘ave here, then?” said Bert the troll – for it was Bert, though to Thorin they all sounded much the same. “Climbin’ ups and downs trees, an’ cuttin’ free meals whats don’t belong to it….” 

“Well? What is it then?” said another voice, which was equally distasteful, though perhaps more nasally, and happened to belong to Tom. “Give us a look, a-fore yer squashes it whole!”

“I’m a hobbit,” came Bilbo’s voice in response, and Thorin was proud to hear that it only shook a little, though he would have vastly preferred it never had a reason to shake at all. “And that dwarf belongs to me, as it happens, so I’d rather like him back.” 

“Hobbit?” said a third speaker – and this one was William, the stupidest of the bunch. “Is hobbits like dwarves, then? Only I don’t like the ‘airiness of dwarf, and we’ve ‘ardly a blinkin’ bit of drink to wash ‘em both down with, what’s more…” 

“He’s not ‘airy at all!” roared Bert with great annoyance. “Not ‘cept his feets. Yer’ve only to look at ‘im to realize that!” 

“Shut yer mouth!” William spat. 

And at this the fear Thorin had felt from the moment he’d heard the first disgusting syllables drool forth from the foul lips of the trolls only doubled, for all the talk of squishing his hobbit would not be in the least improved by riling up the enormous and indelicate creature that held him. 

But before he could take in a lungful of air great enough to shout with what little voice he had left, Bilbo himself interrupted the three bellowing beasts.

“You three ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you know!” he cried out, and the tiny waver in his voice was now gone entirely. “You’re in the presence of dwarven royalty, I’ll have you realize. And you’ve behaved quite foolishly in front of him, to boot. In fact, I’d be perfectly willing to say you’ve dishonored your very race!” 

“Dwarf-in royal’y…” Tom mused. “What d’yer mean? Is they good eatin’, is dwarf-in royal’y?” 

“He’s sweet ‘un, is this thing…” Bert said, “Poor little bligh’er. Trolls don’t give a fig-n-a-half abouts no dwarf-in royal’y, little ‘obbit.” 

“Sweet is right, ‘n all.” Said Tom. “Is yer sweet, ‘obbit? Is yer scrumptious?” 

At hearing this drastic turn in the conversation, Thorin became impatient with his slow revolution at the unknowable impulses of the breeze, and began to attempt to wriggle and wave his arms in such a way that it would turn him around and he could see what was happening behind him. 

This, of course, did little but serve to remind the three lumbering oafs that currently debated over eating Bilbo that he was entirely present as well. 

“Let’s let the ‘obbit go, an’ eat the dwarf-in’ royal’y instead,” suggested William quite helpfully. “Wee thing is ‘ardly a mouthful, an’ all bone from a-lookin’ at ‘im.” 

“Excuse me, but I am quite fat enough, thank you!” said Bilbo with obvious affront, and Thorin closed his eyes in horrified frustration at the bewildering priorities the burglar had thus far displayed. 

“We hobbits feel very strongly about having a proper bit of pudge, and I haven’t traveled nearly long enough in the wilderness to have lost mine!” Bilbo continued haughtily. “Shows what you lot know of the world...” 

“Trolls don’t give no fig-n-a-half ‘bouts the world neither,” argued Bert, “shows what yer knows a’ trolls.” 

“Well a droplet doesn’t give any figs at all about the rain, but that doesn’t mean it’s not part of it!” Bilbo insisted firmly, and Thorin quite felt he had lost the thread of the conversation now. 

“I’ve tried to appeal to your reasonableness, oh esteemed trolls,” the hobbit said with a perfectly polite tone, “but I see it is of no use. So I shall make you a deal. You say you do not like dwarf, am I right? Well I’m only a bit smaller than a dwarf, and much less hairy besides. And neither of us will make much more than a mouthful, if you insist on eating us without any civilized preparation…” 

“We cook!” Tom cut in, not willing to hear such slander. “Trolls is civilized. We jellies things, an’ roasts ‘em whole, an’ Bill makes ‘is mutton soups, though they’re right awful.” 

“Well lucky for you, hobbits don’t just cook,” Bilbo continued patiently, “we cook well. So I will make you a deal, as I said. You let the nasty, smelly, hairy dwarf over there go, and I will teach you how to make me into a soup so delicious it will quite satisfy the three of you.” 

Thorin roared with frustration at hearing this proposal, and he began to flail his arms and legs about angrily whilst he shouted his protests as loudly and as viciously as he could manage. 

“Oi, shut up, yer dirty dwarf-in royal’y!” William hollered to him, and Thorin felt a rather large stone whizz past him on his left – as the troll had clearly meant to hit him with it and missed, instead obliterating a tree or two just beyond where he hung, which then fell to the ground with a terrible creaking crash. 

“No!” squeaked Bilbo, the fright returning to his voice, “you mustn’t hurt him, or our deal is off!” 

Luckily enough for Thorin, the gust of air which had struck him even as the boulder that displaced it did not had served to turn him the right way around, and he now saw the situation his hobbit was in with horrifying clarity. 

How the three lumbering oafs had snuck up on the two of them, he would never know, but the trolls were making themselves quite comfortable now, and had already set out their pot and begun to build a fire. One of them had engaged himself fully with the task, and seemed to be recalling how to start a fire entirely from scratch, while another sat on a freshly uprooted tree and was picking rather sickeningly at his ear – seemingly never satisfied with his results, no matter how many disgusting gobs of this or that unknown substance he managed to pull out. 

The last, and the biggest, of the trolls was holding Bilbo rather roughly with a calloused hand around his middle, and was gesturing wildly with the very same meaty appendage while he argued with his compatriots about the benefits of letting the stinky smelly dwarf go. 

“Stop it! Stop it! You’ll hurt him!” Thorin yelled, though the sound of his voice was lost entirely in the cacophony of unintelligent disagreement. 

Suddenly, though, Bert dropped the hobbit to the ground, and began to howl in pain. 

“He kicked me, he did!” the troll screeched, “An’ with a foot as ‘ard as stone, an’ all! I’ll jammify him! I’ll pulpify him! I’ll grind his bones ta dust, I will!” 

But Bilbo, to Thorin’s great relief, sprung up from where he had fallen – apparently unharmed, and as indignant as ever. 

“You were waving me about!” the hobbit insisted with great exasperation. “You can hardly blame me! I’ve already agreed to be made into Shire Soup, so have some patience in the matter. Hobbits don’t make good jam, you know.” 

“Yer was wavin’ him.” Tom pointed out diplomatically, and with an expression that - among trolls - would qualify as sage consideration. He then reached out to stop Bert from smashing the hobbit where he stood, before continuing: “Now what’s this ‘bout Shire Soups?”

“Yes, what’s these Shire Soups?” William begged to know. 

“Shire Soup is the most delicious, the most delectable, of all the delicacies and dishes in the lands where I’m from,” Bilbo elaborated with great dramatism. “Hobbits are known for their skills in cooking, you see, and Shire Soup is the very pinnacle… uh,” and here he stopped, for he realized his eloquence was simply confusing his audience, “that is to say: We are excellent cooks, and Shire Soup is the best of all our foods. It’s so good, in fact, that to write down its recipe is a punishable offense among my people. We guard the secret of its creation very jealously, and I can’t simply tell it you, you understand…” 

At hearing this, the trolls began to stomp their feet and roar with fury, for now that they had heard of Shire Soup there was little else in the world that could possibly satisfy their hunger for it. 

“I can’t simply tell you,” Bilbo continued urgently, “but I can prepare it for you myself, and when we have finished it to your satisfaction you can add me in as the last ingredient.” 

Thorin continued to protest with great outrage, although his voice was so weak at this point that he himself could barely hear it, and it was likely only his fury and stubbornness alone that kept him from losing consciousness once more. For all that the comfort of black oblivion called to him through his weary mind, he could not possibly leave Bilbo alone in this. 

And so instead he resumed his fruitless efforts to contort himself so spectacularly that he might reach his bindings and release himself, only further encouraged by the angry energy that was provided by his full knowledge of the undoubtable futility in his attempts. 

“Hush, Thorin,” Bilbo – who apparently could, in fact, hear him – called out. And Thorin almost obeyed, at having heard the sweet kindness of his first name from the burglar’s lips for the third time in a single day. It was far more than he deserved. 

But in the end, this of course only served to energize him further, and he redoubled his efforts to escape. 

“So,” said Bilbo, now all business as he addressed the trolls once more, “do we have a deal? One dwarf for the chance to eat our most famous Shire Soup? It is an opportunity many elven kings might travel great lengths for, you know.” 

“Is that why yer with dwarf-in royal’y then?” asked William curiously. 

“Ah, alas it is not,” said Bilbo, who ridiculously enough had the sound of a smile on his voice, though his back was now to Thorin so there was no being sure. “Dwarven taste regarding food is as bad as their taste in food, I’m afraid to tell you. In fact, I’ve known dwarves to eat the secretest of hobbit recipes without knowing it, and to go on to ungratefully make no comment on their spectacularity at all. But this should only serve to further prove my point, for with only a few esteemed exceptions the dwarrow know little of fine food.” 

Thorin wondered, as he strained his hand to reach for the knotted rope that was only inches from him now, just who on earth the ungrateful dwarves who turned up their noses at Bilbo’s wonderful cooking were. And how many dwarves did the halfling know in the first place? He had felt blessed to consider himself among a lucky few before, but was it possible his hobbit took off on adventures with whatever weary travelers happened upon his doorstep, as long as they bore compelling stories alongside their loaded packs, and appealed with wicked cunning to his kind and unguarded nature? Surely not… 

“Well then,” Bilbo said at last, seeming impatient, as if for some reason he couldn’t get himself boiled alive quick enough. “Do we have a deal or not?” 

“I says we does it,” said Tom, after a monumental amount of deliberation. 

“I says we does it too,” agreed William, quite eagerly. 

“I says we squish ‘em into jellies an’ be done with it,” Bert said grumpily – for trolls are a democratic race, and he knew that he was outvoted. “Makin’ us think too hard, is all... An’ the ‘obbit kicked me b’sides.” 

“Two o’ three!” declared William gleefully. “Majori’y! Majori’y!” 

“Majori’y rules, Bert,” Tom said with a tone of finality. “Fill the pot, Bill.” 

***** 

Thorin had begun to suspect that he was losing track of his consciousness once more, although it was equally possible – he had to admit – that even in these most dire of circumstances he was unable to take an interest in cooking. 

Regardless, the trolls’ pot had long ago been filled with water, and it was now boiling sinisterly while huge quantities of ingredients were scavenged from the forest around them by Bilbo, and tossed in after being inspected and cleared by Tom (who was known to be the wisest of the three, for he had once declared himself so, and what sort of fool would to that). 

Thorin watched as Bilbo entered the darkened forest and disappeared from his sight again and again, and his heart fell every time the hobbit so unwisely returned – for whatever reason having made no attempt to escape at all, and instead only having gathered more and more ingredients to add to the morbid concoction that bubbled and steamed with a horrifyingly delicious aroma a short distance away. He pleaded with Bilbo, his voice barely more than a whisper, to simply run away while he had the chance, but it seemed the hobbit could no longer hear him. 

“Wild onions.” Bilbo reported, dropping an armful of greenery in front of Tom. 

“Hrmph…” the troll mumbled thoughtfully, and he examined the hobbit’s pickings for a moment before it seemed that he had either found or did not find whatever it was, exactly, that he was looking for. 

“All ‘n order,” Tom said finally, and a passed them to William, who – to Bilbo’s obvious dismay – simply ground the onions to pieces between his hands and added them to the pot, flowers and all. 

“Nettles.” The hobbit said a short while later, as he returned with further offerings. 

“Nettles?” demanded Bert with dismay. “Nettles are fer stingin’!” 

“Nettles are fer stingin’,” Tom agreed, looking suspiciously to Bilbo for an explanation. 

“Don’t be daft,” said Bilbo, with a good deal of confidence and no small amount of bravery. “Uncooked nettles sting you, but when you boil them they become quite soft and delicious, like spinach.” 

“Don’ like spinach,” protested Bert, though he was now moping more than anything else. 

“Hmmm…” Tom considered thoughtfully, and with two careful fingers he picked up the entire pile of nettles that Bilbo had carried to them in both arms, studying them for a moment. 

“All ‘n order,” he decreed, and William gingerly added the whole clump to the pot, as Bert howled with dismay. 

Thorin, in the meanwhile, only managed to quantify the passage of time by the pitiful amount of progress he was able to make in freeing himself. He strained his back and shoulders – and in fact nearly every part of his body – as he continued to stubbornly fight gravity and pick apart the ropes that bound his legs one fiber at a time. He had no doubt that if he survived the night he’d spend an entire week in his bed at Rivendell, not even caring that it was of elvish make and hardly to his standards. 

But he could scarcely allow himself to think that far ahead just yet, for though Bilbo had secured the trolls’ promises that they would release Thorin before the hobbit revealed to them the final ingredient in their gruesome stew, Thorin himself did not have any such faith in the word of such vile brutes. 

And even if they did, in fact, release him, he would not for a moment consider allowing the trolls the recompense of touching a single hair on his burglar’s head. He was weakened and likely entirely incapable of just about anything at the moment, but he would drag himself between them on his knees if he must. 

“All right, then,” Bilbo said distantly, and Thorin redoubled his efforts at the sound of finality in his voice. Could the hobbit not stall them any longer? Were there not yet more plants to be found all around them, which surely could be added to the pot? 

“That is all the ingredients necessary, save for two,” said Bilbo. “The first is me, of course, but you won’t be getting that quite yet. The second is a secret, which I will not be revealing to you until you fulfill your end of the bargain. Now, would you three please be so kind as to let my dwarf go?” 

“Ah,” Bill whined, “but he was gettin’ so close to droppin’ hisself on the ground, an’ I was wantin’ to see it…” 

“Quiet, you!” insisted Bert, “we’ll just sets ‘im down fer now, an’ gobble him up fer afterwards. He can’t get far lookin’ like that.” 

“You’ll do no such thing!” Bilbo reprimanded, apparently entirely naïve as to the impaired honesty of such dark creatures. “You’ve made me a promise, now stick to it.” 

Tom sighed, seeming deeply put out that he was being asked honor his word, but he sent William to cut Thorin down regardless. 

Thorin, from where he hung, could only watch in horror as the loathsome and slobbering beast lumbered right up to him, and snapped the tree branch that held him aloft with little more effort than if it had been a twig. And with what little voice he had left he shouted his curses to the trolls, and to the whatever had birthed them, and to the very night that allowed them to wander so brazenly from the dank and horrible places where they belonged. 

He was set down then, his head first connecting roughly with the cold and dampened forest floor, and his body following soon after. And he wanted little more than to lay there for as long as he possibly could, while the entirety of him adjusted to the sensation of being righted once more. But he didn’t have the time, for Bilbo was now in more danger than ever, and there was none but Thorin to save him from it. 

So instead he fought his bleary head – which felt suddenly like it weighed nothing at all, and was operating about as effectively as if that were, in fact, true – to discern just which direction was up. And when he found it, he pushed himself toward it, and forced his body to stand upright as best he could. His best, at the moment, included a rather pathetic stoop and a quick pause to settle his treacherously roiling stomach, but he would make do. 

He started forward, then, as he could see in the distance that the three trolls had clustered their towering forms around little Bilbo to glare at him quite suspiciously. But before he could get very far, the branch that was still tethered to him got caught amongst the tangled roots and debris of the forest floor, and as the rope that still bound him by the ankle was pulled taught it tripped him, so that he collapsed into a rather foolish heap on the ground. 

Thorin was beginning to feel a bit desperate, now – for surely he had not lived the entirety of one life which had been so full of trials and grief, as well as a portion of a second that seemed to be amounting to the same, only to be forced to watch his One die right in front of him, while he was so pathetically helpless? He was a flawed and imperfect dwarf, but he could not imagine what he could have done to deserve such treatment at the wicked hands of fate. With little else to do, though, he knelt carefully next to the knot that bound him so infuriatingly to the ground, and with fumbling and half-numbed hands he attempted to untie it, all the while listening with quiet desperation to the scene that was unfolding nearby. 

“Mushrooms?” Bert demanded, the suspicion in his tone evident. “Mushrooms is dangerous, I won’t be trustin’ no ‘obbit with no mushrooms when we means to eats ‘im.”

“Mushrooms is dangerous,” Tom agreed, and it appeared his trust had worn thin as well. 

“Mushrooms is dangerous!” William declared, seemingly only for the chance to have something relevant to say. 

“Shut yer mouth!” Tom hollered angrily. “Tell me, ‘obbit, what’s to stop us from eatin’ our Shire Soup with no mushrooms at all, an’ a dwarf b’sides?” 

“Oh dear,” Bilbo said nervously, and Thorin couldn’t help but glance up to see if his hobbit was quite alright, though his hands did not rest. “A Shire Soup without mushrooms is no Shire Soup at all… See here, these are morels. They’re a delicacy anywhere you might go in Middle Earth, from the tip of the Grey Mountains to the farthest reaches of Far Harad. They taste of steak, people like to say. Surely you three like steak?” 

“We does like steak,” Tom admitted, though his gaze was still suspicious. 

“Well there you have it,” Bilbo declared. “You’ll have my steak mushrooms in your Shire Soup, and you won’t go back on your word. I hold here some of the finest morel mushrooms I’ve ever seen, and I’d swear that on my mother’s grave. On my father’s even, and he was a Baggins, which is as respectable a name as you can possibly find to swear on.” 

The trolls seemed to find the flow of Bilbo’s promises quite confusing, but they understood the emphatic nature with which he gave them well enough. 

Still, though, they were trolls, and oaths meant little to them no matter who they were made by. 

“Well,” Tom said after a great deal of thought, “if yer so sure about it, let’s ‘ave you eat one then.” 

“Have me eat one?” Bilbo squeaked with fright. “That won’t do, that leaves less for you.” 

“We’ll eat anythin’ you do once we gets to yer belly,” William said gleefully, and the other two trolls chuckled with delight at his wit. 

“True ‘nough,” Tom said, and it was clear there was no negotiating the matter. “Now yer to eat one, and then we’re to eat you, an’ then we’ll be a-headin’ back ter our cave soon after, an’ the matter will be done with.” 

Bilbo could not argue with the logic of this, and so he dumped the bag he carried – which Thorin now saw was full of mushrooms identical to the one he had presented the trolls, into the outstretched hands of William. 

The hobbit then carefully considered each specimen among them, for reasons Thorin could not decipher, and in fact seemed to select one to test for himself a few times before returning it with a look of great concentration, and instead choosing another. 

“Well, get on with it!” Bert roared. “We ‘ardly have time to sun-up, an’ we still gots ter eat!” 

“Yes, yes, don’t rush me!” Bilbo said emphatically, and it was clear to Thorin that all the wonderful bravery the little hobbit had maintained for so long had abandoned him. He wished he could offer comfort, could be there for the halfling when even his own admirable strength had left him so, but because he could not he simply began to pull at the knot at his feet with every ounce of effort he could muster, and finally he felt it begin to yield. 

“Eat one, ‘obbit,” Tom said quite menacingly, and Bilbo at last grabbed a mushroom from the pile, and bit down on it with conviction. 

And though Thorin could not begin to reason why, he saw that the hobbit looked down at the remains of the toadstool he held in his hands, and broke it in half, and smiled at whatever it was that this revealed to him. 

“See?” the burglar declared with a touch of triumph, “a morel. And I am perfectly well after consuming it. Now add them to the soup, if you please.” 

William did as he was told, crushing the mushrooms to pieces in his hands, and flicking the cottony bits that clung to his fingers when he did so into the boiling pot for good measure. 

“Now, why don’t you try the fruits of your labor, my friends?” Bilbo asked cheerfully. “For in truth it will taste better without an unwashed hobbit to sully the flavor, though I understand your need for protein.” 

William grabbed the single spoon they shared between the three of them eagerly, needing no further invitation, and quickly slurped himself up a nice mouthful. “He’s right, he’s right!” the troll declared with excitement, some of the soup spewing from his lips as he hadn’t the good manners to simply swallow before speaking. “Steak an’ all, it tastes of! An’, an’,” here he took another enormous bite, to refresh his palate, “an’ onion, a course! An’ garlic, was it? Oh, it’s scrumptious indeed!” 

At hearing his delight, Tom knocked him rather forcefully over the head, and grabbed the spoon for himself. “Give it ‘ere, let me try,” he said, and he sucked up a generous portion of his own with a disgustingly wet sort of sound. “Ah, the hobbit was right, he was! Shire soup is a del’cacy! It’s deleck-able! ‘ere Bert, ‘ave a go!” 

But Bert was not at all interested in their sampling, it seemed, for he turned down the offered spoon in spite of the fact that it was likely the kindest thing Tom had ever done for him. “I thinks I’ll be waitin’ ter taste it till we’s done an’ all,” he said, still glaring at Bilbo with suspicion. “Let’s add the ‘obbit an’ be done with this.” 

Thorin, at last, managed to loosen the knot enough to free himself, and only just in time too. For the trolls had turned to the burglar in their midst and were now eyeing him with an open look of hunger. 

“A deal’s a deal, wee ‘obbit.” Tom said casually, as if they were doing nothing more than completing a business transaction. 

Bilbo looked quite terrified, and began to back away from them slowly. And at seeing this, Thorin managed to right himself, though he did not know quite how, and he broke out into the fastest run he could endure. 

Though Bilbo felt as impossibly far away from him as he ever had before, no matter how hard Thorin pushed his weak and tired legs. 

“Now ‘ow should we best prepare yer?” William asked Bilbo, as if it were a perfectly reasonable inquiry. “Only I don’t wants to be spoilin’ our meal with all the wro-” and there he stopped, for he had suddenly gone quite pale, even for a creature of the night such as he was. 

“Oh my, that was rather quick, wasn’t it…” Bilbo muttered ponderously – and apparently only to himself – before urgently and inexplicably turning to address Thorin. 

“Thorin, no, turn back! They’re going to-” he cried, but here he was cut off, as a sickening wave of bile came streaming from William’s mouth and splashed ferociously with a clinging and sticky heat to douse everything in its path, including poor Bilbo. 

“What ‘ave you do-” Tom cried accusatorially, advancing on the hobbit with an angry look about him, before he too began to shiver and pale, his great greasy form now slicker than ever with the addition of an enormous amount of sweat, and without much more ado he too vomited quite violently before collapsing into a heap next to his friend. 

“I knews it!” Bert declared with righteous fury, “I knews yer was poisonin’ the pot! Never can trust a hobbit on ‘is word, I’m sure!” 

“How dare you!” protested Bilbo, who managed to look quite frightful in his own way, Thorin thought, even covered in the sickly and dripping spewings of two horrible trolls such as he was. “Hobbits do not tell lies, nor especially do Bagginses of Bag End! I told you that you had some excellent morels, and I was truthful in saying it! It’s just that those weren’t the only mushrooms you had, you see.” 

“Why you filthy little…” Bert started toward him with a terrible rage, his stomping footsteps crashing thunderously like they were the very drums that signaled the end of all things. 

But before the troll could get close enough to the hobbit that even Thorin was very overly worried about him, another voice cut through the grove, which had otherwise seemed to be entirely abandoned up to that point. 

“Dawn take you all, and be stone to you!” cried the speaker triumphantly, and Thorin recognized with great relief that it was of course Gandalf. 

Upon realizing this he could not help but look to the source of the noise, and through the first grasping rays of the morning sun as it returned to pour its light into the canyon around him, he caught a glimpse of the wizard standing in the distance – too far for Thorin to see the wretchedly amused glimmer in his eyes, though he had no doubt that it was there. And behind the old conjurer was the rest of their company, watching the scene before them with excitement and awe. 

But as for Thorin, as quickly as he looked away from his burglar he only turned back, unwilling to rest until he saw with his own eyes what he knew must have happened. 

Sure enough, there on the ground where they had curled up so pitifully, William and Tom had been turned forever into lifeless stone. And similarly too had Bert, though Thorin saw that he had gotten far closer to Bilbo than was entirely preferable. 

And there was Bilbo himself, soaked to the bone with all manner of nasty things that did not bear repeating, and somehow still looking every bit the unassuming hero he was. His tired face was lit by the first rays of dawn, and Thorin could think of little else but how deeply grateful he was that he lived yet another day to see the sun warm his hobbit’s cheeks once more. 

The king walked slowly into the trolls camp, his still-numb legs offering little stability now that doing so was no longer of the utmost necessity. And when he finally made it to the hobbit’s side, Bilbo had already been swarmed by the rest of the dwarves, and Gandalf besides, as they took in the great beasts he had for all intents and purposes singlehandedly slew, and fussed over his health, and teased him over the state of his beloved jacket (which was quite covered with the dripping and half-digested remains of the many plants he’d worked so hard to scavenge). 

“Bilbo,” Thorin said quietly, when at last he was close enough to be heard. And with the pain in his throat that he now noticed in full, he quite intended that it be the last thing he said for a good long while. 

“Master Oakenshield,” the hobbit replied with a nod, polite as ever. 

And it took no more than that for Thorin to double over – though he, at least, had the good grace to direct himself toward the nearest bush rather than the poor burglar in front of him – and vomit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you pop an adderall and mean to work on your homework and then you blink and you have 9,000 words of Tolkien fanfiction instead, you know? Hopefully the length is a positive rather than a negative for you all, I considered splitting it into two chapters but I felt like there was no point in delaying the excitement when everyone's stuck bored at home! And, as always, thank you for all the lovely comments, they're the only emails I open immediately, and they make my day.


	8. Chapter 8

Bilbo sighed – though the soft sound of it was barely audible over the distant murmuration of Rivendell’s many waterfalls – and with no small amount of annoyance, he removed the little cloth diary he always kept safely in his pocket, and opened it to his notes for the journey ahead. Quickly enough, for he did not wish to linger on the memory over-long, he made a sharp check mark in the affirmative next to  
1\. Keep Gandalf around  
and almost quicker he scribbled out  
2\. Don’t get used as a handkerchief  
as thoroughly as he could. 

Dratted trolls. If it wasn’t one foul substance it was another, with their kind. 

Though all in all, he considered gratefully, the rest of the necessary events that led them to the Last Homely House had gone as smoothly as could be expected. Admittedly, of course, that wasn’t particularly smooth at all. But their motions had at least held the comfort of being familiar to Bilbo, for the most part. 

Poor Thorin had seemed to suffer more from his time stuck in the troll’s trap than he had initially let on, however. Whether it was his pride or his head that was aching more, it was truly hard to say, but in either case he had been nothing but gruff and dismissive to all of them in the days since, and most especially to Bilbo. Even when Gandalf had wisely mentioned the possibility of a hoard nearby – and Bilbo had watched curiously to see if the gold they discovered therein held the same dark power over their king as the accursed riches beneath his mountain – Thorin had done little but stumble groggily through the damp and darkened stone where a great many treasures sat brining in the stench of the cave’s previous inhabitants, and had showed very little interest in the fascinating array of trinkets they had found. In fact, the dwarf had spared only a glance at his companions as they squirreled away their favorite pieces into little hiding places and hastily-dug holes for safekeeping, and had instead made for the pile of weapons where Orcrist was buried. Without fanfare, he disentangled the sword from the dozens that surrounded it (which had all looked much the same to Bilbo) and stomped back into the fresh air above them without even bothering to dust the thing off. His actions, Bilbo determined, said a great deal about his astute dwarven sensibilities regarding value and craftsmanship, but did very little to reveal any details as to his mental state. 

The fact that he had done little more than grunt with halfhearted annoyance when Gandalf had commented on his sword’s elvish make, however… That surely meant something or another. 

Bilbo had briefly considered – as the rest of the dwarrow had quickly left to follow their king – that he might make a nice little pile of hidden treasure for himself, so that he could have a better pick of the lot than he had on his previous return journey, when the cave had clearly been discovered and looted by a number of luckily undiscerning and apparently incompetent bandits. And the arrival of that question in his mind had served to spark the first of what he imagined would be many a solemn reminder:

With the knowledge he had now… with the burden he intended to bear, so as to spare his beloved nephew from its weight… with all the great and terrible perils that yet lay in store for him… it was very unlikely he’d ever see any of these places again. 

Though, of course, he had thought the same thing when he had sailed with the elves to Valinor, and had thought it again more than once in the days before he died. So at the very least it was a small comfort to him that it was of little use to feel certain of anything in this world. 

Regardless, fate had it that Radagast the Brown had come upon them enshrouded in much the same chaos and confusion he had previously. And as much as Bilbo had wanted to interrupt his incognizant ramblings to provide the enormously important point at hand which the wizard seemed determined to keep misremembering – if for no other reason than that Thorin looked ready to rip someone’s head from their shoulders if he wasn’t allowed to rest soon – they had still made it away from the orcs that then pursued them whilst retaining all the limbs they had started the morning with, and that was as much as he could have asked for in the end. 

It was not the orcs that worried him, though, or at the very least they were not what worried him just yet. Rather, what more immediately gave him pause – as he sat alone on an abandoned balcony of Elrond’s kingdom and reflected on the days most recently past – were the seemingly innocuous moments afterward, before they arrived at their current lodgings. 

They had scraped and squeezed their way through the narrows of the cave they had escaped into as blindly and stupidly as they had the first time around, for when dwarves are presented with an option between unknown dangers wrapped in unfamiliar stone and the possibility of a perfectly civilized conversation with the elves, Bilbo had long since learned that they will invariably choose unwisely. Still, he had noted with some interest that – try as they might to hide the fact, out of what he could only assume was stubborn pride – none of his dwarves could get a reading from the rocks that surrounded them. The normally infallible stone sense of the dwarrow did have its weak points, it seemed, and it amused him enough that he wasn’t quite willing to let them get away with it. 

“Can’t you feel it, Master Ori?” he had asked the dwarf closest to him, who was with every step tapping hesitantly on the thick and chilly grey slabs that leered over them on all sides. 

“I can’t feel anything at all, Master Baggins.” Ori had admitted with a rather ashamed whisper. 

“I can’t either, brother,” Nori had interjected protectively – and Bilbo hadn’t even realized he was so near, though he should’ve known better than to assume there was ever a moment when the sly and secretive dwarf wasn’t listening. “I don’t think any of us can, though through what witchcraft this might be, I’d rather not know…” 

“It’s not witchcraft,” snorted Bilbo, “it’s simple old elven magic. It’s not half so dark as you think, and really I imagine you’d have noticed it sooner if your lot weren’t so opposed to its existence.” 

“Well now, my dear Bilbo,” Gandalf had called to him from far ahead, as it seemed there was no such thing as a private conversation in such echoey chambers of unforgiving rock, “I had no idea you were so well-versed in the subject of elves.” 

“Oh, yes, well,” Bilbo began, feeling rather as if he’d been caught in his lies once more, “I’m no sort of expert, of course. But I’ve always taken an interest in them, and the elves of Rivendell in particular. I even happen to have a passing knowledge of their common tongue, Sindarin, as they are not half so secretive with their culture as dwarves.” 

“Not much they’ve got worth being secretive about,” Dwalin had grumbled, and Thorin had shot him an amused smile before stopping them all in their tracks to glare at Bilbo. 

“We dwarves of Erebor have no quarrel with the elves of Rivendell,” he began coldly, “our disputes lie with their cousins to the east. But I will not see any member of my company being swept up in their nonsense and their pretty words, no matter what foolish predilections you may have developed. We will speak to Lord Elrond, and gather what information we must, and then we will be on our way. The naivety of starry-eyed hobbits is not something I will make time for.” 

And with an audible huff, he had turned back around and led them onward, leaving Bilbo only with his own embarrassment and the odd and considering look Gandalf was giving him for company. 

And so it was that he found himself sitting alone, high in the beatific balconies of the Last Homely House, with the distant sound of dwarven music and riotous laughter drifting upwards on the breeze to him as the rest of the company made merry in the fading light far below. 

It was not that they actively excluded Bilbo – and in fact many of them had seemed to take a quicker liking to him this time around, for he had not whined half so much as he had before, and any that were not as easily impressed had seemed at least somewhat moved by his handling the trolls nearly by himself. But the lot of them trusted their king implicitly, as well they should… And Thorin had been, if anything, even more put off by his presence than he had been previously. Their leader had spent the first day or so of their stay in Imladris confined to his bed, unwilling to admit to his terrible headache no matter how many of their elven hosts so kindly offered to treat him. When he had finally emerged, the distant disinterest which he had previously maintained in the company’s token hobbit had only turned to downright displeasure. Bilbo had once tried to ask after his well-being, and had merely received a sneer and a short remark in response. And even when he began to avoid the king entirely, he often found that the heat of the glower that tracked him around any room they co-occupied was almost tangible on the back of his neck, especially when he so much as asked one of the elves to pass him the salad. 

But this would not stop him, of course, for many among the new acquaintances he had made here were also old friends, and he had missed them terribly in the few months that were in fact a lifetime since he’d last seen them. 

The companionship of his good friend Elrond, in particular, had been most welcome, and he was glad to find that while the familiarity they had once held with each other was swept away – no doubt forever – in the currents of time, their repartee was unchanged. 

As if summoned by the invocation of his very memory, the elven lord stepped into the corner of Bilbo’s vision, and offered him a warm and kindly smile of the sort he had been desperately needing these days. 

“Master Hobbit,” his old friend said, “I did not think to find you here, though I must say I am gratified to see that you have taken a greater interest in the many splendors of our home than have the rest of your companions.” 

“Yes, well,” Bilbo replied, patting the bench next to him in invitation, “you know how dwarves are, of course. They can’t seem to find beauty in anything soft or warm. I have no doubt that even in love it’s the most stone-like and severe features of their other halves that they choose to exalt. I can’t even begin to imagine the poetry…” 

Elrond laughed at that, seeming as entertained by his companion as he ever had been before, and sat willingly with him. “You are not entirely wrong, Master Baggins – though I should stipulate that you are not entirely right, either…” And here his tone seemed oddly knowing, as if he had an insight of some sort into the idea that Bilbo did not. “But how have you been enjoying your time among my people?” He continued. “I have always had a great fondness for hobbits, and I understand that my not having asked after your comfort sooner could be considered a great offense to you, for which I must apologize.” 

“Oh, you are quite alright! And please, m’lord, call me Bilbo,” the burglar replied cheerfully. “Your tact in not referring to my people as halflings should alone earn you that right. As for my comfort, I have enjoyed my time here a great deal, and I thank you for asking. I think I’m right in saying that your home is truly among the most welcoming and comfortable I have ever encountered, which is a statement of greatest regard from a resident of the Shire, as I’m sure you know.” 

“That it is, Bilbo,” his companion said warmly. “And you must call me Elrond, for one who appreciates my house so shall always be welcome in it.”

“Thank you, Elrond… I am quite honored by such an allowance,” said Bilbo - and truthfully, he very much was. Lord Elrond was and always had been a highly respected figure amongst the elves. And while they had reached such familiarity in his previous life as well, and he had been flattered enough by it at the time, it had then taken quite a good while longer before he’d even been on first name terms with the half-elf leader of Rivendell. 

But because he was himself, after all, and in fact always would be, Bilbo could hardly allow a conversation to pass with his newest and oldest friend without a bit of teasing. 

“I must tell you, though,” the hobbit continued, a placid smile on his face as he lit his pipe quite contentedly, “that the tricks your lot have been playing on the dwarves are not lost on me. I’m perfectly aware that all elves eat meat, with the exception of Denethor’s kin – and if any of them happen to be visiting your halls from their homes in the First Age I will be very surprised indeed to hear it.” 

Elrond laughed in delight at being caught, a rare but true smile wrinkling his ageless eyes. “I must plead innocence in that regard,” he said, “for I had no part in the decision to feed them nothing but greenery upon their arrival. That was the doing of my talented and rather devious cooks. But I will confess, I did not go very far in telling them off, either. It would seem that your company managed to offend a number of my kin quite severely in the short time it took the dwarrow to walk from our main gates to our receiving rooms. If we are to be accused of weed-eating, my people have rationalized that we might as well live up to the name.” 

“You’ll hear no complaint from me!” Bilbo chuckled in return. “Elvish cooking is twice as fine as anything we’re likely to encounter on the road no matter the ingredients, and a few vegetables never hurt anyone. Though many of my friends seem quite convinced of the contrary.” 

“And are they your friends?” Lord Elrond asked softly. 

The question was a tad invasive, but his ancient eyes held only the same concern and care they always had throughout their friendship, so Bilbo could not manage to be in the least offended by it. 

“They are and they aren’t in equal measure, I believe.” he mused, doing his best to appear unconcerned by the matter. “I think they have not yet quite made up their minds as to just what it is they think of me, and when dwarves don’t understand something they tend to mistrust it. This, at least, they seem to have in common with many of my relatives.”

Bilbo felt he had performed his attempt at a casual demeanor quite admirably, but one as wise and as kind as Elrond was not so easily deceived, it seemed. 

“Do not let it trouble you, dear hobbit,” the elf lord responded comfortingly. “They may yet come around to you, and if they do not you have my assurance that they are among the greatest of fools in Middle Earth.” 

“Well, I…” Bilbo said, rather flustered at such a compliment, and no doubt blushing quite ridiculously as well if his luck was what it always had been. “That is quite kind of you, m’lord. Elrond, that is.” And there he passed his pipe to the half-elf beside him, for he was certain that if he tried to say anything else at all he would only serve to embarrass himself. 

Elrond accepted the offered pipe, and puffed away at it calmly. “I would like to make you an offer,” he said, after a moment of silent consideration, “though there is something in your eyes that assures me you will refuse it. However, if there is a chance that you have any small inclination to go no further with these friends who are not friends of yours, you would be quite welcome to stay here instead, for as long as you wish.” 

A small sense of yearning tugged at the inner reaches of Bilbo’s heart, and he found that he did very much wish so indeed. His friendship with the elves, unlike that which he’d had for himself among the dwarves, had been as easy to revisit as if he had never left them at all. And he knew that he could very well stay here, and be perfectly comfortable amongst these people he loved once more. There were yet still hundreds of books in their libraries that he had not even glanced upon, and he had no doubt there were thousands more stories they had not yet told him – for many of the elves of Imladris had been present on Middle Earth for nearly as long as the sky that surrounded it, and had witnessed the rise and fall of more stars than Bilbo could ever possibly hope to count if it was all he ever did. 

But he also knew that just because his relationships with the dwarves – who still yet hollered and sang and caused a wild ruckus below – was hard-won and at times difficult, that did not mean that they were any less real or true. In fact, it was for this very reason that he felt he owed it to them to continue onward. It was very possible that they would never accept him as their own, not like they did the first time, and truthfully he had no idea just why it was that they had eventually taken such a liking to him at all. But whatever it was that had won him their favor, he couldn’t possibly hope to repeat it under the best of circumstances, and he especially could not now that he had the open disdain of their well-respected leader to contend with. In spite of this, though, he couldn’t allow himself to be lost forever in books and stories here in the Last Homely House, not while the dwarves he had mourned and missed for decades upon decades were still out there, unprotected and unaware of the dangers in store for them. It did not matter if they were not his friends now, for he was and always would be theirs. 

And as much as this new and hard-hearted Thorin felt like a stranger to him, he could not possibly let him die. 

“I thank you for your offer, Elrond,” Bilbo responded at long last, accepting his pipe as it was returned to him, “but I am afraid I must refuse you, for now. These dwarves would clearly be lost without me, you see, and there are… things which must yet be done, in my future.” 

He almost considered telling his friend the truth, in that moment, for he desperately wished that he could receive the sage counsel he had once taken for granted in those last years before his death when everything had seemed so certain. There were few who knew as much of the One Ring as Lord Elrond himself, and he had been instrumental in arranging the fellowship that had been its undoing, once. 

But Bilbo had also seen firsthand how the ordeal had worn on Elrond, and knew that even now, in the relative past such as they were, it had already done so to an extent far beyond what the half-elf deserved. He had been forced to watch as the ring had corrupted Isildur, his friend and long-distant relation, and he had been equally forced to long bear the burden of guilt at not having disposed of the ring by whatever means necessary when he had been given the chance. 

So no, Bilbo reluctantly decided at long last. He would protect his friends from the power of the ring as much as he was able, no matter the cost to himself. 

In taking so long to contemplate what should have been an easy decision, Bilbo realized that his pipe had quite gone out in his hands while he’d fiddled with it absentmindedly. It was most unbecoming of a hobbit, and rude as well when he had been sharing it with another, so he relit it hastily and passed it back to Lord Elrond, who was looking at him with an expression of deep consideration. 

“You know,” the elf began slowly, pausing for a moment to exhale a large and vague cloud of smoke (for elves do not consider partaking in pipe-weed to be an art form the way dwarves and hobbits and certain wizards do), “you truly are wrong, when you say that dwarves will not love anything unless it is hard as stone. If you will permit me, I have a story to that very effect, which I have not told in a long while, and would like to tell you now.” 

“Oh, yes please!” Bilbo exclaimed excitedly, “elven stories are second only to their singing, for entertainment.” 

Elrond looked pleased at the willingness of his audience, and with no further ado than to take a final drag of the pipe before returning it to its owner, he began his tale: 

“You must imagine a time long ago, and then a time long before that, to understand the length of the years that have passed since those I tell you of lived. And yet, the love I witnessed in those days has not faded from my memory, in spite of this. It was the love that legends are made of. 

“In the days of the Second Age, I lived in the elven town of Eregion, to the west of Moria – or Khazad-dûm, as it was called amongst the dwarves who resided there. Theirs was a mighty kingdom, still known to be the greatest creation of the dwarves even into the current age, and forged by Durin himself, from whom your company’s leader is a direct descendent. The craftsmen who lived there were unparalleled by any since, and one of the greatest among them was named Narvi. He was a great artist, and a noble friend to many an elf, though none could ever hope to love him half as much as one. 

“For amongst my people, craft and creation was no trivial matter either, and the greatest of our smiths was Celebrimbor, the Lord of Eregion. His name you may recognize, as it was he who created the three elven rings of power. But despite the misfortune that followed those most infamous of his works after their corruption at the hand of Sauron, they are not that which I remember him by. To me, and to all that truly knew him, he was one of the two creators of the Doors of Durin. 

“You must understand,” Lord Elrond continued, seeming lost in his own memory – as he now looked with unseeing eyes at the rooftops of Rivendell, where soft rays of moonlight reflected from the running water around them and danced carelessly through the shadows below. “This… tension between the elves and dwarves is hardly new. Though the claimed basis of it is always whatever imagined slight has most recently occurred, I will tell you truthfully that its roots are rather more trivial. Dwarves have always considered elves to be foolish and flighty, while elves have always considered dwarves to be hard and unyielding. It is likely that as in most things we are both right, and both wrong, but that is neither here nor there. In the city of Eregion and the kingdom of Moria, however, this was not so. Trade between our regions flourished, and in our willingness to share our customs and traditions so did our craft. But none of this would have happened if it were not for Celebrimbor and Narvi. 

“They loved each other, with a passion as much as any two mortal beings could possibly hold, and it was difficult not to get swept up in the good nature of it all at just being near them. There are some close-minded among us now who doubt that love between races can ever truly flourish, though the very line I am descended from speaks to the mistruth of this. And there are many more still who would doubt that an elf and a dwarf could ever love each other at all. But the love that Celebrimbor and Narvi shared in was among the purest I have ever known.

“Together, they created the Doors of Durin, at the very foot of the Misty Mountains where Eregion lay, so that they could not even be separated by the short time it took to travel between the gates of Moria and the elven city. Celebrimbor draw the signs for the elven enchantment that allowed access into the very heart of Khazad-dûm, and Narvi carved them thus: 

“Pedo mellon a minno. Speak friend, and enter.

“Theirs was not a tale that ends happily, so I shall instead only finish it there. But it gives me cause to think that you might find dwarves to be capable of loving even the softest and most foolish among us, if only you can find a way to gain entry into their well-guarded hearts.” 

Bilbo sat for a moment, enjoying the lovely glow of being wrapped in a good story, and considering the meaning behind it as he listened to the sound of chirping insects that battled to be heard through the soft sway of leaves in the night wind and the gentle rush of water – for the rest of the company, it seemed, had long since abandoned their revelry for the sake of rest, and indeed it felt almost possible that he and his dear friend were the only two people on earth who were yet still awake. 

And it was then that an entirely different and much deeper voice cut through his golden comfort like a harsh and biting knife. 

“Did I not warn you against engaging with the elves, halfling?” Thorin growled, emerging from the shadowed door behind them with no warning at all of his approach. 

Bilbo jumped in shock at the unexpected intrusion, and dropped his pipe on the ground, scattering the remainder of the half-burnt pipe-weed from its bowl. This dismayed him quite a bit, as he had long since learned that a good smoke was a luxury on long journeys, and not to be wasted. 

Elrond looked at Thorin with open but politely-contained disapproval, and kindly knelt to pick up Bilbo’s pipe before the hobbit had even recovered enough to do it himself. 

“I was not aware that the people of the Shire were yours to command, Master Oakenshield,” the elf lord said, now rising to tower over Thorin with his lips pinched into a tight frown. 

“I was not aware they were yours to steal away.” Thorin returned coldly. 

“Friendship is a thing that can only be freely given, I have found,” said Elrond. “A fact it would be wise for you to remember, in the coming days.” 

“Do you offer me insult?” Thorin demanded, outraged. 

“I offer you a warning,” Elrond replied calmly, and his gaze turned once more to the silver-tipped world that the endless stars lit below them. “I know that dwarves dislike elvish turns of phrase, and so I will speak plainly. I am well aware of the madness of your line, Thorin Oakenshield, and I already have my suspicions as to your intentions in traveling eastward. I do not think it wise for you to continue on your quest, but I also have come to understand that to try and stop you would only prove foolish. In continuing on the road that lies before you, however, it may serve you well to remember this: friendships, as I said, can only be freely given, and for this reason they are worth far more than any fathoms of gold. But unlike gold, a friendship once lost can hardly ever be reclaimed.” 

Bilbo, privately, thought that this was not very plainly put at all, though it was very in character of Elrond to have said it so. But he made no comment on the matter, for Thorin looked oddly stricken at the elf lord’s words, for a moment. 

And then, of course, he directed a glare at the burglar, as if the turn of this conversation he had so rudely chosen to interrupt was somehow Bilbo’s fault. 

“The well-being of my line,” the king said, seething with overt anger, “is none of your business, elf lord. Nor indeed is it the hobbit’s.” 

“Now then, this is a merry gathering!” exclaimed another voice entirely, and Bilbo groaned with frustration at the way this perfectly lovely night was turning out as Gandalf walked slowly up the steps below to join them.

“To what purpose do you all meet?” the wizard continued cheerfully when he had reached them at least, either entirely unaware of or entirely unaffected by the fact that the communal mood he had entered into was as thick and dark as mud. “I was under the impression that we had no plans to discuss our purpose in being here with your lordship until tomorrow at the earliest.” 

“We were discussing the relative wisdom of allowing the dwarves to continue on their ill-advised quest to reclaim their homeland.” Elrond said, clearly in no mood to dance around the subject. 

“Ah,” said Gandalf, looking as if he’d been caught in the middle of doing something he’d rather no one had noticed (though this was one of the most common of expressions among wizards, and was hardly unusual). “I was going to tell you, of course. I was merely waiting for the chance.” 

“Indeed.” Replied Elrond, seeming largely unimpressed. 

This worried Bilbo, for though they had not had Elrond’s blessing in the matter the first time around, he was still the only one readily available who could read the moon-script that would reveal the location of the hidden door to them, and if he were not willing to do so it would be nearly impossible for Bilbo to communicate this information to the company on his own without arousing a good deal of suspicion. 

“Come now,” he interjected nervously, in an attempt to save the conversation before it truly took a turn for the worst, “I think we can trust that Thorin knows what he’s doing.” 

“Can we?” asked Elrond, though his tone was kinder toward Bilbo than it had been toward the other two, luckily. “There is a dragon beneath that mountain, which has slept for sixty years. What will happen if this plan should fail?” 

“But what will happen if it should succeed!” Bilbo insisted, looking to his companions for support – though he got none, for Gandalf was giving him the same look of worrying interest that he had seen in the narrows of the caves, and Thorin was merely staring at him with an unreadable expression and his hands clenched in tight fists. 

“It is a dangerous move, Bilbo,” said Elrond, gently but sternly, and Thorin scowled at his familiar use of the hobbit’s first name, no doubt still enraged by Bilbo’s perfectly reasonable willingness to make friends outside of his own kin. 

“Come, Lord Elrond,” Gandalf interjected, apparently having decided to be helpful at last, “surely you can see that strengthening our allies in the east will serve us well? Dangerous it may be, but it is also dangerous for us to do nothing. The throne of Erebor is Thorin’s birthright, what’s more, so what is it you fear?”

“Have you forgotten?” Elrond demanded, his outward demeanor still as calm as ever, though Bilbo knew well the urgency that flowed beneath its surface. “A strain of madness runs deep in that family.” 

Bilbo risked a sidelong glance at Thorin, for though he did not wish to anger him further with what was apparently unwanted concern, he knew that hearing such words was no doubt difficult for the dwarf. And he was surprised to see that Thorin was looking back at him with great apprehension, as if worried at his having gained this new information. No doubt because he expected blackmail or something equally ridiculous, Bilbo decided, and he looked away as quickly as he could. 

“Gandalf, these decisions do not rest with us alone,” Elrond continued. “It is not up to you or me to redraw the map of Middle Earth.” 

“That is true, my friend,” Gandalf admitted, “but it would be unwise to think that maps will not be altered if only we do not touch them. These dwarves – and this hobbit, it would seem – are quite determined to take back their homeland, and they will continue their quest to do so whether we give them aid or not.” 

At this, Elrond sighed, seemingly with deep resignation. “As you say,” he granted, “but know this: if their journey should end in fire, it is not me you must answer to.” 

And with no more to say on the subject, the elf lord returned Bilbo’s pipe to him, and swept gracefully from the balcony. Gandalf, too, followed close behind, seemingly as cheery as ever even after such a heavy conversation as they’d had. 

This left only Thorin and Bilbo, and after a moment of hesitation – for he did not want to inspire the dwarf king’s ire, and it seemed nearly anything he did had the chance of doing so – Bilbo tucked the pipe away in his pocket, and looked up at his friend. 

What he saw, for the briefest of moments, was not the Thorin Oakenshield he had come to know on this journey. Nor was it the Thorin Oakenshield he had known in the time they had last spent in Rivendell, who had been a great deal more polite but still wholly uninterested in his existence. No, for no more than a second or two, Bilbo saw an expression on the dwarf’s face that he had only come to know in the very last days of their time together, before the damnable Arkenstone had come between them. It was one of care and concern, and held a weariness that Bilbo once would have readily tried to wipe away. 

Now, though… much as he still yearned to do so, this new king under the mountain was unfamiliar to him, to an extent far beyond the minute differences he had noticed in the remainder of his friends (for even the tiniest of changes in circumstance are not the same as no change at all). And while once he would have gone to Thorin’s side without hesitation at seeing him exhausted so, now Bilbo could do little but offer him a more distant kindness.

“Are you quite alright, o king?” He asked, his voice barely more than a whisper. 

This, it seemed, was not the correct decision at all. For Thorin’s face clouded over the moment he had finished speaking, and within an instant all the openness and vulnerability his expression had unknowingly betrayed was gone. 

“I am perfectly well, Master Burglar,” he responded coolly. “See to it that you do not waste the time you are being paid for in the company of fools… And get some rest, the journey ahead of us will be long, and may begin again much sooner than you think.” 

And with no more use for the hobbit, it seemed, the dwarf king left him, and Bilbo was once more alone. 

****** 

The rest of their time in Rivendell was one of peaceful repose, for which Bilbo was quite grateful. Having taken to heart Thorin’s directive not to waste his time with fools, he had avoided the king outright as often as possible, going so far as to leave any room he entered. This had worked quite well for him, and he dreaded the impending impossibility of such an option which crept slowly closer as their time for a hasty departure grew nigh. 

Still, the rest of the dwarves seemed to be doing their best to make merry in such an unfamiliar and – to them – off-putting land. At Bilbo’s intervention, the elven cooks had begun to serve small amounts of meat and bread with their meals, and though it was still interspersed with far more green and growing things than dwarves ever preferred to eat, they had quickly made a game of dumping all of their fruits and vegetables and so forth onto their hobbit’s plate, and cheering him on with great amusement as he managed to eat all of it, no matter how large the pile. 

It was in the midst of this very activity – his mouth full of pears toasted with cinnamon and served with a delicious white cheese, and his friends roaring with amusement around him as they scavenged up more delicious treats and tossed them at him from all angles – that he witnessed the arrival of Saruman the White and the Lady Galadriel, and he knew the time of their departure was nigh upon them. 

This, he had expected – for he knew they would spend no more than a few weeks in the lovely halls of the elves. And much as he would like to stay there forever, he knew that he had already had his chance to do so, and there was much yet to be accomplished before his time on this earth was done. 

What he did not expect, however, was to receive the attention of the esteemed and lambently beautiful Lady of Lothlórien. 

It was for the briefest of moments, as the stoic cortege of her attendants – which followed after her with a solemn silence that only elves could manage – passed the small dining hall that the dwarves had commandeered for themselves. Bilbo, distracted as he was by the revelry of his friends, almost did not notice the sound of her voice, and likely would not have done so at all if she had actually spoken to him. 

As it was, it came to him in his mind, like the elves of his mother’s stories had done. 

“I see that you have returned to Rivendell, Bilbo Baggins,” her voice whispered warmly between his ears. 

It had shocked him, when he realized what had happened, and twice over when he realized exactly what she had said. So much so, in fact, that he had dropped the handful of seeded rolls that the dwarves had been handing him eagerly, which was most unbecoming of a hobbit who knew the value of good food, and caused his friends to groan with disappointment. 

“I have, my lady,” he responded – though he knew not exactly how. It seemed that there was some small intangible difference between his private thoughts and those he shared with the Lady of the Wood. “Was it you that brought me here?” 

She smiled slightly at him, and the warmth of it was as much as a hundred days spent laying in the fields of the Shire and relaxing in the summer sun. “No,” she said, “I am but a pupil of Yavanna, your maker, and of Aulë, who crafted the dwarves. I cannot say that I understand to what purpose you have been brought here, but I can see in your eyes that you are much older than you appear, and have been through a great many things I am not yet to know.” 

She then glanced to her left, and Bilbo followed her gaze to discover that Thorin, confound the ill-tempered dwarf, was lurking in one of the many archways surrounding the company, and was glowering at the two of them with open disdain. 

“You may have found that a renewed life offers many trials you had not encountered previously,” Galadrial continued, and there was no doubting what she was referring to. “But know this, hobbit of the Shire. You are not alone in your journey, nor shall you ever be.” 

“Thank you, my lady,” Bilbo said graciously, for he assumed that what she meant was that she would be with him in spirit. 

She nodded, with a grace and dignity few else could manage in a gesture so small, and departed from them. Bilbo did his best to ignore the angry glare he was no doubt still receiving, instead refocusing his attention on his friends, who were now trying to goad one of the elves into arm-wrestling Dwalin. 

It was that very night – as Gandalf met with the White Council to discuss their ruling on the fate of the Company of Thorin Oakenshield – that the dwarves took the choice right out of their hands, and escaped the wonderful city of elves through one of the many hidden passages that led to it. And this time, as they stepped over into the edge of the wild and away from all the comforts of home, Bilbo did not once look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know a frankly ridiculous amount of Tolkien lore, but there are plenty of people who have literally made it a full time job, so it's very possible some of you might have picked up on some errors. If they're small, let's just pretend they're part of the slight differences in this universe... If they're big, please let me know. Obviously, Narvi and Celebrimbor were only written as good friends, but so were Sam and Frodo, and Gimli and Legolas, and Thorin and Bilbo, so who cares.  
> Anyway, as always, hope you're all doing well in these trying times. And thank you once more to everyone who comments, they always brighten my day!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> REALLY long one this time...

Fili had always been a dwarf of great intelligence – a conclusion he had come to after quite a bit of thought on the subject. While his younger brother was, of the two of them, always more prone to action, Fili instead tended to consider his decisions long before he made them, and contemplated events long after they’d passed him by. His mother liked to tease him about it, saying his head was so far in the clouds he got himself lost up there more often than not, and he had always wondered what that meant. Thorin, on the other hand, had once said it was a trait that would make him a fine king, and to Fili there was no opinion more absolute than Thorin’s. So he decided to keep up his pondering, no matter how much it annoyed Kili, and indeed he made a point of thinking hard about at least one thing every day. 

Today, the subject was his uncle himself. It often was, for the dwarf was an unknowable enigma who seemed to delight in shrouding himself with secrecy and stoicism. Or perhaps delight wasn’t the right word, for to Thorin it seemed there were few things as pleasurable as being a bit grumpy. 

Nevertheless, his uncle had become – somehow – twice as baffling in nature these last few weeks as he ever had been before, and it fascinated Fili’s ever-churning mind quite endlessly. 

The king’s unnatural aura of secrecy was chiefest among the relevant questions upon which Fili’s mind presently masticated. Kili – as he had said many a time in their discussions on the subject – had long suspected that the source of Thorin’s penchant for privacy was that their uncle had secrets which even he wished not to know, and he subsequently went to great lengths to hide them from himself. Fili – whose tendency it was to consider every question through the larger-scoped lens of his philosophies on life and the meaning of all things – had instead come to the conclusion that secrets were by and large a burden, and were hardly worth the effort they took to keep, unless everyone around you could admire how many of them you had. Therefore, Thorin’s secrets must be very large and exciting indeed, for it seemed at any moment as if he might forget to watch where he was going and would accidentally spill them all. 

It was, the dwarven prince further thought, for very much the same reason that Nori had so many friends. Sneaking around was all well and good, but if no one knew that you were sneaking and could be impressed by how well you were doing it, there was hardly any point. This, he concluded, was why Bilbo would never be a truly good burglar. He seemed perfectly content to go unnoticed. 

Of course, good and bad were relative terms as well, he knew. Were you to ask Dori, good was good and bad was bad, and things that were good would always be so, and things that were bad were hardly worth talking about. Were you to ask Dwalin, however, the matter began to become rather more complicated. You could be bad at good and good at bad, it seemed, and therefore Bilbo’s being bad at burglary largely made him bad at being bad which in a roundabout way made him somewhat good - though at what, Fili was never entirely sure. 

And were you to ask Gandalf, of course, you would be wasting your time entirely. Fili had only ever met two wizards, but in doing so he had gathered the firm impression that the only thing to be gained in asking them anything was that you would spend a good deal of time in deep discussion only to walk away feeling certain there was an answer to your question, and equally certain it hadn’t actually been given to you. 

He had once tried to explain all of this - the science and nature of good and bad, as well as the science and nature of wizards - to Kili, but the young lad was hardly old enough to understand such things, and had only given him a rather unimpressed look in return, so he’d given up on it for now.

As it stood, though, Thorin’s long-held propensity for opaqueness had only doubled in recent days, as well as having been garnished with a healthy serving of downright behavioral oddity, and topped off with a wildly fluctuating temperament. And there were few combinations more tantalizing to Fili’s eager young intellect than that. 

Perhaps oddest of all, though, was the fact that the confusing nature of Thorin’s conduct seemed to revolve around their little hobbit friend. It made little sense, when one considered how long his uncle had known the fellow, and it further continued to make no sense at all when one added the fact that they hardly seemed to like each other. 

Although that was not entirely true. Bilbo seemed to like everybody he had yet encountered, and had even managed to down the ghastly trolls that had been attempting to eat him whole by murdering them with manners, of all things. It had been delightful to watch, for to dwarves there was no such thing as sinister politeness, and in fact to many of them there was barely such a thing as politeness at all. It was something reserved for large meals with important figures, and for first meetings with your One’s family (just to prove you could do it), but beyond that they had little use for the concept. Gandalf, however, had explained to them as they had watched in awe that amongst hobbits politeness was considered a type of blunt-force weapon, and even if they were intent on wrenching your head from your shoulders a halfling would always insist on doing it with a proper amount of decorum. The dwarves had marveled at that, for to them enemies were much like secrets, and half the fun of having them was making sure everybody knew about it. But the wizard had explained that the same was not true in the Shire, as such overt overtures of contempt not considered proper, for some reason or another. No, if you truly wanted to know what a hobbit thought of you it was not their manners you’d have to look to, but rather their mannerisms. 

And so that was what Fili did, though what he found was hardly illuminating. Bilbo, it seemed, was perfectly content to ignore the existence of the king under the mountain altogether, though the king could not similarly ignore Bilbo. In fact, most nights they were to be found on opposite ends of the camp – where the burglar would often chat with Bofur or Ori or any of the other dwarves that had taken such a shine to him, and would allow his gaze to fall absolutely everywhere but upon Thorin. Thorin, meanwhile, hardly seemed capable of looking anywhere but at Bilbo. 

It was maddeningly confusing, but asking the halfling directly had only revealed that he possessed some of the same conversational magic that wizards did, and Fili had only left their discussion feeling as if he had been told a great many things that in fact revealed nothing at all, and had also at some point agreed to take care of the many chores around camp he’d been so purposefully neglecting. 

This left him with nothing to do but to ask Thorin, for though his uncle’s ire was hardly something to be sought after, he at least had the decency to be plain about it. 

Fili tried to approach the subject in a roundabout way, as Balin had so dutifully schooled him in the many delicate designs of diplomacy ever since his childhood, and as boring as that had all been it certainly seemed to have its uses. 

“Kili and I went mushroom hunting with Bilbo, a little while ago,” he said one night, plopping himself down rather heavily next to where his uncle and Dwalin had customarily sat themselves at a distance from the rest of the company.

Thorin only grunted, hardly looking up from where he was so carefully polishing Orcrist – applying healthy amounts of oil to a cloth that looked suspiciously like the napkins they had been given in Rivendell, and running it over the already shining blade in long smooth strokes. Dwalin did not react at all. 

But Fili knew his uncle well, and he waited a moment. 

“Is the hobbit well?” came the mumbled question, after no more than a minute was spent with only the distant sound of laughter and cheering from the other side of camp daring to break their silence. This, Dwalin reacted to, giving his king the unimpressed raise of a single eyebrow, which earned him only a scowl in response. Fili began to suspect meant that there was more understanding about this whole mystifying confustication in that meaty head of his than he had been letting on. Blast those two, with all their silence and their unspoken knowledge. 

“Quite well, I believe,” he responded with forced boredom, not wanting to give away too much, and preferring that his uncle come to him for a change. “Ours were the very poisonous mushrooms that killed those foul beasts, in fact, though I don’t know if you were able to see that with your head turned upside down.” 

Thorin paused his work to glare at him, but Fili was not to be deterred, for he knew the rest of their discussion had the potential to anger his uncle far more than some gentle ribbing, and he had prepared himself for that fact. Besides, he had glimpsed a brief but rather amused smile out of Dwalin, and that gave him courage. 

“It is a good thing Master Baggins went with you, then,” Thorin grumbled, returning to his methodical motions and focusing entirely once more on the sword in front of him, “for I have no doubt you two would have eaten the mushrooms yourselves without him, and a half-wit for an heir is better than no heir at all.” 

Dwalin laughed in full now, a single bellowing chuckle, and Fili did not quite like the turn their conversation had taken. But he had started it with a purpose, and he would see it finished, so he merely sat and waited. 

“Did… has the hobbit made any mention of anything of interest?” Thorin asked, after a few minutes more of relative silence, which had only served to underline just how cold it was where they sat away from their fire and friends. “Even seemingly unrelated subjects may prove relevant to our quest.” 

“Well,” began Fili, “there was that story about the elves and their mushrooms, which I have already told you… and we did briefly talk about the concept of Ones, though I don’t remember quite how that came up.” 

“And what did he have to say about that?” Thorin demanded, seeming almost to restrain himself from something or another. It was, in fact, his uncle’s ardent attempts to convey the enormity of his disinterest that then intrigued Fili, for that had not at all been the subject he would have expected Thorin to latch onto. 

Dwalin, however, seemed so unsurprised he might simply die from it, and the prince noted to himself that he was going to need to demand answers from the tight-lipped dwarf. And sooner rather than later. 

“Oh, nothing much… Um….” Fili started, though his attempts at recollection were not at all aided by Thorin’s now open look of impatience. “We told him about dwarves having Ones in the first place, which seemed to be news to him. And… oh, yes, we mentioned that joke mother always makes about how you’ll never bother to find yours.” 

This was apparently not the right thing to have mentioned so offhandedly – as for some reason Thorin’s expression became very pained with the knowledge that the hobbit had been told what was a common line amongst their family, and Dwalin was now giving Fili a rather baffling look that suggested it was he who was behaving oddly, of the three of them. 

“We also talked about hobbit romances,” he continued on quickly, seeing nowhere to go with the subject now but to forge ahead, “he said they’re more like men in that regard, only they don’t have much infidelity. Hobbits seem to be very beholden to the concept of love, it dictates nearly every choice they make whether by its presence or its absence.” 

Thorin was now looking equal parts contemplative and anguished, which was a relatively good sign, and so Fili pressed forth. 

“…and he mentioned that while most hobbits may love many times, he never shall, for as he put it ‘once was more than enough for me’… or something along those lines, anyway.” 

Thorin’s academic interest in the customs of the Shire seemed to have run its course by then, for his face had shut down entirely by the time Fili had finished his sentence, once more returning to the state of passive indifference he assumed so comfortably. Dwalin, however, was now shooting the king a few furtive glances, though his main expression was one that made it rather clear he’d like to flick the young prince right in the middle of his forehead. For what, exactly, Fili had not the foggiest idea, but he did not like it in the least. 

It was then that he called upon Balin’s many lessons in warfare – which had always been more interesting to him than diplomacy anyway – and wisely decided that a hasty retreat was perhaps the most advisable tactic at the moment. With some fumbling excuse, the details of which he could hardly recall even as he made them up, he rose from his seat beside the two glowering dwarrow rather awkwardly and bid them an abrupt goodbye. 

Much like his conversation with Bilbo, it seemed largely as if in speaking to his uncle he had not received a single spoken answer to any of the questions he had meant to ask. But Thorin’s insistence on revealing nothing had in itself revealed a great deal, he felt, and if Kili and he put their heads together on the matter he was sure they’d be able to figure it out. 

***** 

Thorin had never considered himself much of a naturalist. That tendency had always been Bilbo’s purview, and in fact the hobbit’s appreciation for the simple beauties of the world around them had at some point become ridiculously endearing to him. More than once on their renewed journey, he had watched his friend smile without shame or self-consciousness as he gazed out in wonderment at whatever tapestry of impeccable imperfection was unfurled before them by some holy hand. To the dwarf, the vistas and scenery they passed without pause had all begun to blend together, and even the mountains soon began to look much the same as any which they had crossed over last. But this never seemed to be true for Bilbo, and it was with a frequent pang in Thorin’s heart that he was then so constantly reminded that there was no quantity of gold in all the world which he could possess that the hobbit would find half as alluring as the simple sight of a flowing valley of yellow-tipped grass, and an endless sky to rest beneath. 

Still, though he was nowhere near as enchanted by the splendors of the natural world as Bilbo, he was not blind to them either. Middle Earth was a great big wonderful place, full of thick and thriving forests, and sunsets that always had just the right sort of light, and jutting valleys and ravines that cracked the earth for stretches so impossibly large they must remind even the elves that they would not live half so long as to hope to create something quite so splendid themselves. And no matter the petty conflicts of dwarves and men, it was a newfound reassurance to him that the simple and firm fact of the world’s beauty would always be true…. 

Unless, of course, it was raining, and he happened to be outside. For then the entire world narrowed and shrunk down to just him, and his soaked clothes, and how desperately far away the nearest shelter was. It seemed to Thorin that there were thousands of ways to look upon your time on earth, but only one way while it was raining.

It was with this sense of fantastical dissatisfaction with the weather that the lot of them once more began to ford the steep and treacherous slopes of the Misty Mountains, and Thorin’s foul mood was not helped in the least by his dreadfully detailed knowledge of every peril they had only just avoided the last time they had done so. It seemed hardly right that he should allow his friends to march headfirst into such danger without proper warning, but he knew that he could not give any such guidance without revealing an extent of his predicament which may not be entirely wise. He therefore concluded that there was little to do to compensate for his unspoken betrayal other than to face every hazard first. 

And so it was that he lead the group of dwarves and one single hobbit up through the craggy and rain-slicked slopes of the mountains, and further and further away from the unhomely home of the elves. 

Thorin would have much preferred to have the hobbit by his side for the duration of this most treacherous part of their trek, but it was with a certain amount of sorrow that he discovered his plan to distance himself from his burglar was working. Bilbo had insisted on being as far as possible from him at the back of their single-file line, presenting some excuse about making sure there was someone to help if any of the rest of them began to fall, and Thorin bitterly found that the reassurance of the safety in his distance was a hollow one indeed. 

The thunder above them roared with a deep displeasure that every member of their company felt akin to, to some degree or another, and the rain pelted them in an ice-cold stream which seemed as if it would outlast the sky itself out of pure spitefulness. And Thorin was capable of thinking of little else but how soaked he was, and how dreadfully far away Bilbo’s warm smile was from him now. 

“Hold on!” he called out in warning behind him as their trail became yet slicker, though the uselessness of his plea was lost entirely in the deafening crack of greater and more violent bellows of thunder, which echoed back to them from across the rugged stone they navigated, and lingered in their ears far longer than felt natural. 

It was through the remnant refrains of this ear-splitting earthen cry that he only just made out the sound of rock giving way, though he felt it – whether through his stone sense or in the strange piercing of his heart – just the same. Bilbo had begun to fall. 

Luckily, it was Dwalin that had brought up the rear with the hobbit, and before Thorin had even managed to wrench himself around in horror his friend had roughly grabbed the burglar by the collar of his beloved jacket – pausing in surprise for a second that seemed to last forever – before pulling the little fellow back to safely rest on the dangerously sloped path where he belonged. The great and burly dwarf then made a show of dusting their hobbit off, and Thorin somehow knew this was for his own reassurance more than anyone else’s. 

He had never said anything to Dwalin of his feelings for Bilbo, but he had no doubt that his friend was aware regardless. With him, it was most often the things that were never spoken at all that he made sense of best, and this was neither the first time nor the last that Thorin would be grateful for that fact. 

“We must find shelter!” the king shouted to his companions – for his own sake as much as theirs, if he was honest, for his nerves were now beyond the point of fraying, and he could not handle the thought of encountering the stone giants as they were. 

But it was far too late for that, it seemed, for Bilbo – at hearing him speak – looked up frantically from the endless chasm he had almost fallen victim to, though his eyes did not meet Thorin’s. Instead, they studied the ridgelines beyond with suspicious scrutiny, before... 

“Look out!” He yelped in fright, realizing then just what it was he saw moving so laboriously in the distance. “It’s the stone giants!”

And so it was, though their entrance into this miserable footslog felt as though it had come far earlier than once it had in days previous. Almost vindictively so. 

Thorin hadn’t had time to properly prepare, though what it is he could have hoped to conjure up that would make them fit to face such ungovernable uncertainties he did not know. But he cursed himself for his recklessness just the same. 

He was hardly able to indulge in his own self-reproach for long, however, for a massive boulder – almost a small mountain in its own right, and certainly larger than the entirety of their company put together – had been pitched by the fictile fumblings of an enormous earthen hand, and was now flying towards them at the languid pace that all large and apparently infallible things took. The dwarves watched in terror as it passed just over their heads, and some of them even screamed – while those who remained silent found they could not blame the others – before it struck the mountain above them with a thunderous crash and a grating splinteration of stone and mud. 

“Take cover, you fools!” Thorin cried over his shoulder, tucking himself and Fili – who was closest to him – into the safety of a crevasse as best he could. 

“Thorin!” Balin shouted to him, his head ducked beneath his cloak to shield himself from the shards of dirt and slate that poured down on them with the rain, and seemingly as afraid as Thorin had ever seen him before. “This is no thunderstorm, it’s a thunder-battle! Look!” 

But Thorin did not need to look to know what was happening just beyond the small shelf of crumbling rubble they occupied. Through the incessant downpour and the grim darkness that surrounded it he knew the giants had awoken, and were engaged in warfare with as little care toward the dwarves and hobbit that clung so desperately to their mountains as if they were no more than ants to be crushed. 

Even so, he knew that simply holding on would not be enough. 

“Kili!” He screamed, barely able to hear himself over the howling of wind and the rumbling bellow of unimaginably large hunks of stone being ground to dust. 

But somehow his nephew knew that he had called. 

“Thorin!” Came the answering yell, sounding far further than he would have liked. 

“You must move forward!” Thorin yelled with such ferocity his throat burned. “You are not safe!” 

Kili looked at him like he was insane – and it was very likely that he appeared to be, drenched and half-drowned, his braids in windswept knots, and with an expression of terror on his face that he could feel plainly though he had no way of seeing it.

And yet his nephew followed him anyway. 

Slowly but steadily, the young dwarf obediently crept toward him, every treacherous foothold feeling like an enormous risk. And behind him followed Bofur, who was hollering wildly about legends and fairytales coming true, and then Ori after, whose movements were much more meek and overtly afraid, but who did not falter. 

It was almost enough. 

Those three made it safely to join the rest, before the earth split with a terrible groan, and Thorin felt himself go hoarse with screaming as Dwalin and Bilbo were borne away from them on the knees of a great stone giant. 

“Jump!” Kili yelled to Dwalin, who was close enough that he might have made it. 

But Dwalin looked at Bilbo, and looked at Thorin, and did not move. 

***** 

In Bilbo’s notebook – which was currently wedged somewhat uncomfortably between the softest part of his hip and a rather large rock – he had taken a similarly succinct approach to planning their encounter with the stone giants as he had with that of the trolls. 

The reasons for this were, however, entirely different. Whereas their experiences with the esteemed Tom, Bert, and William had felt – through the lens of his great foreknowledge as to their quest as a whole, and with all his awareness of the sheer number of perils they would have to overcome in the journey ahead – entirely blown out of proportion, and perfectly manageable if they were smart about it… the giants were anything but. Their company either would or would not survive the encounter, and either way there was little to be done in the matter. Or, at the very least, there was little to be done by one tiny hobbit. 

No, there were instead more pressing landmarks to be reached in his time on this mountain, and he had largely focused his efforts in planning there. Still, this hadn’t quite stopped him from insisting to the others that he take the rear position of their party, and thereby allowing himself some small comfort in the illusion that if all of his friends were in his line of sight they couldn’t possibly fall from the mountain and be lost altogether. 

As it turned out, though, it had only been he who had needed to be helped in fording the severe and winding path ahead of them. His hardy hobbit feet on the rain-slicked rocks and ice were unfortunately no match for the steel-spiked attachments the dwarves had lashed with leather to their boots, and it had hardly been a surprise to him – though an unpleasant one it still was – that at long last it was he who almost took a tumble. 

The look of fury Thorin had sent his way, however, filled him with nearly as much dread as the sensation of nothing but air and crumbling earth beneath him had. The dwarf king had hardly been kind to him in this part of their journey previous, and he could only imagine the earful he’d be getting this time. 

It was with this very bitterness in his mind that he quite forgot to feel wary of what lay only just ahead of them, and it was not until the great swinging fist of an unfathomably large beast was careening wildly above him – displacing such an enormous amount of air that the wall of wind which hit him a second later nearly threatened to blow him from the mountain altogether – that he at last remembered his duty to his friends and the impending horribly close call he’d really rather they all avoid. 

“Kili!” He heard Thorin shout, seeming somehow as impossibly distant now as he ever had in death – though there was no time to examine that, at the moment. “…forward…. You…. Not safe!” 

The fierce howl of the storm around them had whipped the majority of the king’s words straight from his lips, but the message was clear regardless, and Kili – as he ever did, in the face of certain danger – followed Thorin without question. 

Bofur and Ori, however, required a tad more convincing, and it was only with Dwalin’s rather more menacing help that Bilbo managed to get them moving. He did not know exactly what threat it was that Thorin could see from his vantage point, but it would not be helped in the least when the stone giant on which they now stood decided to take part in the battle above them, and the very idea of it filled him with dread. 

“The legends!” Bofur cried in wonderment. “They’re true!” 

Bilbo attempted to shush Bofur, for his hysterics were not encouraging poor young Ori who was frightened enough as it was, but the sound of his admonishment was no more audible to him than he imagined it was to the miner. Luckily, Dwalin seemed to agree with his concerns, and he reached over the youngest Ri brother’s soaked and tufted hair to cuff Bofur lightly on the head, displacing his hat and causing the dwarf to sputter indignantly as some of the water that had pooled in its folds was poured into his eyes. 

Theatrics and ridiculousness aside, Bilbo was relieved to see that the three dwarves ahead of them had soon crossed over to what he seemed to recall was an area of relative safety, and Dwalin was only just behind. Perhaps they would make it through unscathed after all. 

He really oughtn’t to have thought that, he realized in retrospect, for the Valar seemed to be easily bored and endlessly entertained by his constant tribulation. 

It was, of course, then that the mountain itself split in two and began to separate their party with the threat of a sheer drop to certain death, which grew wider and wider as with every slowly passing second the faces of his horrified friends became increasingly distant from him. 

“Jump!” cried Kili, extending his hand desperately as if that might somehow help. 

And Bilbo fully expected Dwalin to. Wanted him to, even, for as tough and indominatable as the dwarf had always seemed, he was still his friend, and Bilbo did not relish the thought of his facing any perils. 

But Dwalin did not, and in fact he did not even hesitate, seeming hardly to consider the option at all. Instead, as the leg of the colossal creature swung in a great arc that now obscured them entirely from the view of the rest of their company, Dwalin pressed Bilbo roughly against the weather-beaten wall of rock behind them, and shielded him from the outside world as best he could. 

And so Bilbo now found himself wedged between a mountain of a dwarf and a mountain itself, unable to see the shelf of hard and unrelenting stone with which they would soon collide, though he knew without a doubt that it was coming. 

“Dwalin, protect yourself!” he shrieked. “We’re about to-“ 

“Quiet halfling,” his friend shouted gruffly over the raging storm, “I’ve got ye.” 

“No, you don’t understand!” cried Bilbo, who could now once more hear the distant screams of their companions and knew their trajectory was near to its end. “We’re about to-”

But no sooner had he attempted to warn the dwarf of what was about to happen to them than he found that it already had.

With a crash somehow greater and more terrible than any that had come before it, the leg of the giant they clung to collided with the peak below, and as Dwalin pulled the hobbit closer to him and allowed their momentum to throw them roughly against the relative safety of the cliffs, Bilbo found that for a moment there was no cliff at all. Nor was there any rain, nor sky, nor distant sun, nor far-off friends. Instead they were surrounded by shifting rock on all sides of them, and the small alcove they had tucked themselves into seemed to threaten to collapse and bury them alive at any moment. 

There was no sound to be heard beyond the deep and baleful moan of ancient crumbling rock, and Bilbo could hardly breath for how tightly Dwalin held him, so that they could squeeze as far as possible into the small shelter they had found and away from the solid shifting mass of the giant’s leg which threatened to grind them to meal. 

And then a shaft of murky light parted the darkness, and the panicked screams of their friends were audible once more, and it was very odd indeed that the sound of it was like a signal of salvation to their ears. 

“Bilbo! Dwalin! Bilbo!” cried Thorin, loudest of them all. 

“Dwalin! Bilbo! Oh thank Mahal!” the others whooped and shouted, as at last they reached them, and Dwalin was pulled roughly away from Bilbo by Balin, who wrapped him in a hug. 

“Bilbo!” yelled Bofur, who picked him up from where he lay in a daze and hugged him just as tightly, as if they too were brothers. “We thought we had lost you!” 

Bilbo allowed himself to be wrapped up in Bofur’s arms, and returned the hug as fiercely as it was given, though he knew well enough the moment would not last… 

“Do not bother to get too attached to the halfling.” Thorin spat, and even the shrieking of the wind seemed to quiet in the face of his ire, as he stood at a distance from the rest of the celebrating company and glared at Bilbo ferociously. “He is not yet lost to us, but I have no doubt the time will soon come. He is not meant to be amongst us, as soft and breakable as he is. It would have been better for us all if we had left him in the comfort of his home in the Shire, and not carried him like a burden through such perils. There may yet be no saving him, no matter how you try.” 

It was not quite the same speech, word for word, that the dwarf had delivered last time. But Bilbo was not at all the same hobbit who had once heard it, and he found he did not have the same patience for being treated so – especially by one he so foolishly loved. 

“I’ve had quite enough of this, o king under the mountain,” he said, delivering the title with a great deal of sarcasm as he turned to face Thorin with a glare of his own. “You all may doubt me all you’d like, and don’t give me that look – none of you.” He continued, for some of his companions appeared ready to deny his accusations, though others still only looked shocked at his blatant disrespect towards their leader. “I know many of you think I am not meant for this life, and I can’t say that I blame you entirely. Perhaps you are right, even. But I am here on this journey to stay whether you’re thrilled by it or not, and I will not waste my efforts in trying to convince you of anything. Especially not right now. I’m cold, and I’m hungry, and I’d like to find shelter, and if it’s quite alright with the lot of you I’m going to go ahead and do so. You’re welcome to join me, if you’d like, but at the moment I find I care very little if you’d rather sit out here with your mouths hanging open and drown.” 

And with nothing more to say, he stomped off in a what he considered to be a rather impressive huff, the feeling of bitter victory in his heart only slightly dampened by the few times his feet slipped beneath him in his retreat. 

***** 

Thorin was not very pleased with himself. 

It was a feeling he was familiar with, although the burn of it in his chest was perhaps more ferocious now than it ever had been before. He had seen the hurt in Bilbo’s eyes at his harsh words on the slopes of the Misty Mountains – much as the burglar had tried to mask the feeling in a healthy layer of indignation – and he could not help but recall how troublingly similar the expression was to one he had seen once before. 

It was a pale imitation of the saddened sense of betrayal he had inspired a lifetime ago, when he’d stood on the ramparts of his almost empty kingdom and threatened to cast off the only thing that could have possibly made that place a home. But it was still yet far too comparable for comfort, and it had horrified him to realize that he’d once more been the cause of such pain in the very heart he valued as much as if it were his own. 

Though at the very least – he thought bitterly – he was not alone in his self-reproach, as it seemed a good half of his company was perfectly happy to let him know how unimpressed they were with his treatment of their hobbit, and he had little doubt that the rest of them had similar but more private judgments for him.

It was just as well, for they were entirely right in feeling so. The disappointed glares of his nephews, which normally would have inspired nothing but indignation at their insolence, now felt like little more than a perfectly just punishment. And even Dwalin had grumbled a bit at having risked his own skin to save their burglar just for the king to cast him aside as if it hardly mattered at all. 

It seemed as though – in his efforts to spare Bilbo from his own weakness, and to exempt his friend from the consequences of his many faults – he had only managed to hurt him in an entirely different and profoundly unexpected way. And Thorin cursed himself for having done it, for there was little more he wanted from this renewed life of his than to allow the one he loved every possible opportunity to be happy. He would reclaim Erebor once more for his people, and he would slay Azog to assure his family of their safety. But for himself, he had long since found that through some unknown element of being thrust so roughly into his own past, his long-held hopes for the future – even the future that was now behind him – had come to feel foolish and largely inconsequential, viewed as they now were through the lens of his own insurmountable mortality. And indeed, there was little he still desired – to the deep and desperate extent with which he had once desired a great many things – as much as the reassurance that somewhere, perhaps terribly far away from him and tucked safely once more back in his hobbit hole, Bilbo was truly happy. 

Thorin’s attempts to distance himself from Bilbo had genuinely been with only that most noble of intentions, but it seemed that no matter his methods he was doomed only to cast a shadow over that lovely smile he yet yearned to see. 

And so it was that he came to the conclusion that he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with the hobbit at all, but it was more than likely that to apologize was the first step. 

This, however, was far easier said than done, for much as Bilbo had been avoiding him in recent days to begin with, he was now downright unapproachable. The halfling had stomped away in a furious huff after telling the whole lot of them off, and Thorin had received no small amount of glares at having been the one to rope the rest of them into the burglar’s indignant line of fire. It seemed that the company was already becoming protective of their smallest companion, possibly to an even greater extent than they had before. And Thorin was grateful to see it. 

Nevertheless, it had been with his tail tucked between his legs that he had taken up the rear of their party, as they’d followed Bilbo a short distance through slick rocky scrambles until he found a grotto that suited him well enough. 

Thorin had been prepared to face further telling-off to interject in protest if they had taken up camp in the most large and welcoming cave in their vicinity, which he knew well enough would only lead them down to Goblin-town. But it seemed not to tempt Bilbo, for he passed over the entrance to it without any visible consideration, and ignored completely the insistence of the dwarrow nearest him that it looked rather comfortable and convenient. 

Instead, they finally settled in an alcove that was much more disagreeable, for it was half-exposed to the weather still, and the ground at their feet was not covered with soft and pleasant sand but with large slabs of slate which appeared to have splintered off during the thunder-battle that had only just begun to die down, and which seemed perfectly designed to poke the dwarves in their backs no matter how artfully they attempted to rest upon them. 

The company grumbled and complained about this, of course, but they had the good sense not to contradict Bilbo outright, and privately Thorin thought there were few options available to them that he would have felt safer in. He couldn’t imagine what it was that Bilbo was thinking when he chose the place – though he suspected it was some sense of vindication at causing them all discomfort – but it was as far from the goblin trap they had last fallen victim to as could be found, and he was enormously grateful for that fact. The hard stone beneath them seemed solid, at his examination, and was unlikely to give way beneath them. And though the wall of the cavern had a rather large crack running down its center, there seemed to be little threat of its collapsing entirely. 

Yes, though Thorin doubted he would sleep entirely soundly until they had left this accursed place – and likely even longer than that – he was satisfied that they were as safe here as they were likely to be anywhere else. 

Which was true, in a manner of speaking.

It happened so quickly that none of them even had the chance to be alarmed by it. One moment Fili and Kili were stacking the rubble around them to form convenient chairs which they planned to sit upon smugly while the rest of the group suffered the hard cold ground below them… and Bofur was whispering reassuring words to Bilbo as he pressed a small carving of some sort into his still-soft hands… and Glóin was unfolding his bedroll while he chattered on about the many accomplishments of his wee lad Gimli to Óin (whose ear trumpet remained suspiciously tucked within his pocket)…

And then suddenly the crack in the wall widened ever so slightly, and the few of them that saw it had hardly cried out in warning before they were entirely overcome by an army of goblins, and were being rudely poked and prodded by a great number of sickeningly rusty spears as the horde wrenched them away from their uncomfortable camp with snarled threats and marched them down below the surface of the earth to greet their king. 

Thorin remembered the horrible brute quite well, and had little interest in reacquainting himself, but it seemed they were once again to be offered little choice in the matter.

The dank and dark system of caverns and subterranean streams seemed to absorb every shuffle of their feet and indignant yelp of whichever goblin next decided they weren’t moving fast enough, only to spit the sound back at them from eerie and unexpected angles. And as they continued to navigate the chambers of sodden stone, an even greater noise began to make its way toward them. It was the roiling conjugation of millions of singular points of mayhem all rolled into one shrill and eternal echo.

This was the goblins, of course, for they had nearly reached the end of their march, and were nearing Goblin-town, in the center of which sat the throne of their king. And as the dwarves drew closer, they began to be able to pick out singular notes in this distasteful symphony. There was the shrieking cries of goblin chatter, and plenty of atonal singing as well. A tinny and misshapen gong was being smashed at random intervals to compliment this, and every time it rang out the horde reacted in horrible delight – which entirely drowned out the other assorted sounds of squabbles and scampering, and the munching and crunching of bones. 

And then at last they reached the end of the darkened caverns, and the sight of Goblin-town in full lay before them. It looked exactly as it sounded, or perhaps even worse. Rickety platforms of rotted wood and decaying bridge systems of rope and yellowed bone cut through the area with no apparent forethought as to their placement, and an incalculable swarm of goblins dangled from them – jeering viciously as the dwarves were escorted past, and stomping their feet with such ferocity that the entirety of the shanty town seemed in danger of collapsing. 

It seemed to take ages, though not quite long enough, for them to navigate the odd infrastructure of the place, and by the time they at last reached the Great Goblin’s throne Thorin’s patience had all but worn away. Rather than provide any introduction, the goblins that had grabbed them from their unobtrusive encampment merely dropped the swords they had managed to nab from the dwarves with a terrible clatter, and Thorin was not the only one who cringed angrily at the mistreatment. 

“Who would be so bold as to come armed into my kingdom?” roared the Great Goblin, whose visage was quite terrible enough to defy all description, but whose voice – it should be noted – was enough to send the many bats that had nested in the area fleeing with screeches of fright. “Spies?” He continued to demand grotesquely. “Thieves? Assassins?” 

“Dwarves, your malevolence,” provided one of their captors, in a tone that somehow suggested this was hardly better. 

“Dwarves?” the Great Goblin cried, smashing his staff in dismay onto the platform on which they all stood, and causing it to wobble treacherously beneath them. 

“Found them lurking round the back-ways,” another goblin rasped helpfully. 

“Lurkers, are they?” the goblin king cried with enormous suspicion. “Sneakers through secret passages, I have no doubt! Bastards and dastards and cowards, all of them!” 

At this, the good majority of the company took visible offense, and began to declare their outrage and struggle against the many and clammy goblin hands that held them back. 

“Silence!” Thorin shouted with what remained of his voice, and luckily it seemed the respect of his company was not entirely lost to him, for as he stepped forward from their midst they still readily quieted at his command. 

“Well, well, well…” the Great Goblin said, his tone now disgustingly smug. “Look who it is. Thorin, son of Thráin, son of Thrór, King Under the Mountain!” 

And at this he gave a mocking bow… 

“Oh, my!” He continued, “Only you’re not, are you? How could I have forgotten, you have no mountain, do you? And without your mountain, you are no king. Which makes you… no one at all.” 

The goblin’s wicked grin at his own cleverness ignited a fiery rage in Thorin, though it seemed an injury to his pride did not provide quite as volatile a fuel as it had the last time around. Perhaps because he had heard that very insolence before, or perhaps because some small part of him now knew it to be true. 

“I know someone who would pay a pretty price for your head,” the goblin king continued. “Just the head, you see, nothing attached…” and at this his grin grew wider in the most unnatural of ways. “Perhaps you know of whom I speak? An old enemy of yours, I believe. A pale orc, astride a white warg.”

Thorin took some small pleasure in being able to provide the swaggering filth before him with no reaction at all to what he surely must have imagined would be a powerful statement. And it seemed he was right, for the Great Goblin seemed to pout for a moment at the stone-faced reception his grand revelation was given, before muttering to one of his many subjects with noticeable annoyance that Azog the Defiler was to be alerted at once of the dwarven presence in his mountain. 

It was in their king’s relative silence that a number of the goblins that had captured the company began to then search through the things they had confiscated from them. And Thorin, having had quite enough of the conversation, and knowing well how to end it, nudged Orcrist with one of his boots as subtly as he could manage, so that it caught the eye of one of the imbecilic investigators. 

Sure enough, the flash of moving metal drew the eye of a particularly stout member of their hosts, and it picked up the sword with interest, before quickly throwing it to the ground once more with a shriek of recognition. 

The Great Goblin, who had drawn closer to inspect the source of the commotion, then began to back away in terror and dismay, with little regard to any who stood behind him. “I know that sword!” he moaned, “It is the goblin-cleaver! The biter! The blade that sliced a thousand necks!” 

At hearing this, the entirety of the enormous cavern erupted into raucous wails of displeasure. Heavy feet were stomped, and rotting teeth were gnashed at the injustice of it all, and the mountain itself seemed to sway under the weight of their anger. 

Thorin realized, then, that it had not in fact been the presence of Orcrist which had in the end saved them, but rather the presence of a certain insufferable wizard, and he began to hope that nothing had changed so very much in their journey that a similar salvation would not come. 

“Slash them! Bash them!” roared the goblin king, “Bite them! Smite them! Tear them apart and let naught remain! I will have his head!” At this, the foul oaf pointed directly at Thorin, and it took no more encouragement than that for a number of goblins to tackle him to the ground, and attempt to do exactly that. 

Luckily, it seemed that their company was not yet exempted from the good favor of Fate, for it was then that a glorious wave of piercing white light washed over them – and with an accompanying crack and the sulfurous scent of brimstone, a good many of the Goblins were cast away, dead. 

“Follow me, quick!” said Gandalf – for it was Gandalf, of course. 

And at hearing his familiar voice, the dwarves stumbled urgently to their feet, and gathered up their swords, and ran to him with much relief. 

“Quickly now, quickly,” Gandalf insisted, “those that survived will regain their senses soon enough, and then we will be in trouble.” 

Thorin looked around in desperation as the shadows of his companions rushed past – for the wizard’s magic had extinguished many of the torches that lit this sunless place, and even his dwarven eyesight could not pierce the dark entirely. Finally, at the very back of their group, Thorin saw exactly what he had suspected he might. Bilbo could not possibly keep up, not when his legs were much shorter and he was not built to be running from such great danger in the first place. Surely, this must have been the case last time as well, for in his foolish singlemindedness Thorin must not have noticed that Bilbo had fallen behind them, and he had as good as left his friend for dead in doing so. 

That would not be the case this time around, he determined – and seeing no other option, he lifted the hobbit up in his arms, and sprinted to catch up with the distant light of Gandalf’s staff as he led them through winding pathways and over crooked chasms to make their escape. 

Bilbo seemed to make some small noise of protest at being carried like a child, but the sound of the goblins as they gathered their ranks and made chase drowned it out well enough that Thorin was able to pretend he did not hear it at all, and soon enough he had fallen in step with Dori – who, being a decent fellow, had stayed at the tail end of their group in order to make sure that Bilbo and Thorin were not left behind. 

“About-turn!” called Gandalf ahead, barely audible over the growing cacophony of the goblin’s screeches. “Thorin, you must draw your sword!” 

Thorin began to protest, but Dori reached over and took Bilbo from him wordlessly, somehow managing to deposit the halfling safely on his back without breaking pace. 

The next few minutes were lost in a flurry of steel and the clashing of blades – as Thorin and Gandalf, and every other dwarf who could manage it, worked together to keep the tide of goblins that nipped endlessly at their heels at bay. They navigated recklessly through the half-lit dark, every footfall upon such treacherously warped wood and over such unfamiliar and absurd terrain threatening to be their last. 

It was with the distant hope of daylight filtering softly into the tunnels just beyond them that they encountered the goblin king once more. 

He stepped into their path, blocking the blue glow of morning entirely from their vision with his mass, and a cruelly vindictive gleam shone in his eyes. 

“You will not escape so easily, dwarves.” He said, spitting the final word as if it were an insult. “It takes more than a wizard to leave my halls without permission. Here, there is but one king under the mountain.” And at hearing such cleverness his many subjects began to chatter and cheer, as they had at last caught up to the forestalled company and now gathered to watch the proceedings with much excitement. 

It was clear the Great Goblin was determined to get a rise out of Thorin, and – in finding that his words did not have the power he wished them to – he instead began to cast his wet and beady eyes around the group of them, searching for signs of weakness. 

“Ah, but what do we have here?” He growled with malicious delight, seeming to have found one. The bullish and stinking brute reached forward over the heads of the dwarves – the shifting of his enormous weight causing the perilous wooden bridge on which they stood to creak and groan, and sending small particles of dust and debris falling into the unbroken and endless dark below. And without any concept of gentleness or gentility at all, he plucked Bilbo from Dori’s hold as if he weighed no more than a feather. 

“This is no dwarf,” the goblin continued, bringing Bilbo close to his nose to give him a disgusting sniff. “Not a human either, not quite. Tell me, Thorin Oakenshield, what is the importance of this little creature to your quest?” 

“Put him down.” Thorin demanded, doing his best not to betray just how valuable a ransom the goblin held. 

“I rather think I will,” said the goblin king gleefully, extending his arm so that Bilbo hung above the yawning chasm below them, held aloft by only a few meaty fingers. 

“No!” Shouted Thorin, and he was not the only one. 

The Great Goblin seemed quite delighted to learn his hunch was right, and his clumsily lifted a finger from his grip, so that Bilbo was now only pinched between two sweaty extremities and a single thumb. 

“I see…” said the goblin king (though theirs is an unintelligent race, and he very likely did not). “And tell me, King Under Nothing, just what is the importance of this little creature to you?” 

Thorin met Bilbo’s eyes, which held a panic he had never seen before, not even when a similarly deadly fall had been threatened at the hand of one he might once have called a friend. And he was sure an equal amount of terror was plain in his own face, for he would not try to deny it now, neither to the goblin king nor to Bilbo himself. 

The Great Goblin removed yet another digit in his impatience, leaving Bilbo hanging from only his pointer and thumb. 

“No!” Thorin shouted once more, though this time it was more of a roar. “He is of the utmost importance… and it is for that very reason I warn you that you must consider your actions carefully. There is no price that you can possibly pay which will satisfy me if he is lost, except your head, and that of every member of your kin. The great tree of Durin’s line cannot be felled, and I swear to you that if any harm comes to him your kind will never know peace for as long as the dwarrow draw breath.” 

Surprisingly enough, the goblin king seemed to ponder the threat rather seriously – though whether this was due to the forcefulness of its delivery, or his own ineptitude in pondering anything at all, it was rather difficult to say. Regardless, he sat there a moment or two, biting his chapped and swollen lips in thought as he considered the various outcomes of the choice before him. 

And as he considered, he began to sweat. 

And as he sweat, his grip began to falter. 

And when it faltered, Bilbo fell.


	10. Chapter 10

“Oops,” said the goblin king, looking down at the murky darkness which Bilbo had just disappeared into, and seeming as surprised as any of them. 

It was this expression of mild chagrin that would be his last – for with hardly a thought, Thorin raised his goblin-cleaver high above where the Great Goblin still stooped to peer contemplatively at the abyss beneath them, and with a cry of anguish and outrage he brought it down with enough force to separate the goblin’s sickly head from his bulbous neck entirely. 

No sooner had he done so, however – and in fact before the beast’s crown of bone and twigs had even met the wooden walkway with a dull clatter – than did he cast his sword aside and scramble to the edge of the precipice, searching for some sign of hope contained within its depths. 

But there was none to be found. His hobbit did not dangle just beneath them, clinging to some unseen but highly fortuitous outcropping. There was no salvation offered by the Eagles of Manwë when they were so deeply buried beneath cursed rock. 

Bilbo was gone. 

There was – for a moment – not a sound to be heard. From the grandest peak of the mountain to the great depths beneath it which had swallowed the little burglar whole, not a creature stirred. The company stood rooted in their shock and dismay, as if it were a thick mud that clung to them greedily and offered no escape. There were no gasps or cries that came from the dwarves’ mouths, though they hung open. Gandalf, visible from the corner of Thorin’s eyes, only closed his own in sorrow, and shook his head minutely. And even the goblins had fallen into a stunned silence for the briefest of moments, though this was more likely due to their unintelligent incapacity for adapting to such a shocking turn of events, rather than any newfound respect for the dead. 

He was dead, though. 

Bilbo was dead. 

Thorin repeated this to himself in his own head, still staring at the darkness which seemed to have no end, and with a sense of approaching panic he found that he could not make himself believe it. He felt like the most wretched of creatures, even here in the unholy den that housed a great many things which were so far beyond foul. Try as he might, he could not tempt even a single tear for the one who most deserved them. He could not convince himself to mourn. 

But grief, he decided, would wait. For anger was far easier to come by. 

And so it was that he attempted to muster a final battle cry from his dry and tormented throat, though he found that it sounded more akin to a wail than the fierce roar whose description he had once so admired in the stories of great dwarven warriors of old. It did not cause the goblin army to tremble and quake where they stood, but the dwarves amongst them recognized it for what it was regardless, and took up arms with furious laments of their own. 

It began as all great conflicts do – which is to say, in the middle. Thorin had hardly made the unarticulated announcement of his intention to strike down every goblin in his path before he found that he had already begun to do it. He was doing it. And he had, in fact – judging from the burning in his forearms and shoulders, and the ache in his chest – been doing so for a good long while. He was not alone in this, however. Not at all. For beside him, as he glanced around, he found that Dori was flanked by his two younger brothers as they cleft a good number of their foes clean in two, with an expression of infamous dwarven rage on their faces. Similarly, Kili and Fili were to his right, mastering wave upon wave of their endless enemies with the boundless energy of vindictive spite. And around him on all sides were the rest of the dwarves, whose feelings were made as clear through the ferocity with which they fought as they were through any expressions their faces might have unconsciously held. 

Even Gandalf, who was slowly encouraging their retreat toward the safety of the rising sun, did so with many an intermittent pause to bring the bite of Glamdring upon any goblin head which might dare to venture near it. 

At last, though, the company had largely made its way to the shaft of morning light which harkened their escape, and it was only Thorin, Bofur, and Bifur who refused to leave the fight, and Dwalin who refused to leave Thorin. 

“Ikhrish-hun!” cried Bifur ferociously. “Mahal zurulahu!” 

Cut them down! Mahal wills it! 

“Khama Durin! Dufburul! Amrâd du ragân dûr!” shouted Bofur in return, outrage and sorrow tinging his every word. 

For Durin! Onwards! Death to their naked chins! 

Thorin, for his part, found he could not speak. He could hardly think to understand what was being said around him, even, for he was lost in the rage of battle and the thundering of his own heart. 

He knew, off in the distance, that the rest of their group was calling for their retreat. The goblins continued to pour from the many tunnels which led to the narrow bridge on which he still stood, and their source seemed endless and unfathomable. But he was not yet satisfied. They had taken something from him which was precious above all jewels. Something which even mithril could be considered blessed beyond measure just to adorn. And even with the rent and disfigured bodies of a good number of their ilk piling ghoulishly around him, he found that had not yet begun to exact such harsh revenge on his enemies as he could ever hope would satisfy him. 

It was not until Fili’s voice cut through the dark and stormy fog of his anger that at last he gave any regard to their warnings. 

“Thorin!” he heard the frightened call of the young dwarrow he – in his heart – considered a son, as it echoed clearly through the unforgiving stone which surrounded them despite the pained yelps of goblins and the angry cries of his remaining battalion which might have drowned it out. “Thorin! You must tell them to fall back! They will not leave if not for you! You won’t survive!” 

His tone was pleading, and Thorin recognized the emotion behind it. It was the very same one with which he had once watched, helpless, as Azog had carelessly discarded the body of the very same dwarf who now begged for his escape. It was the feeling which had sat like a stone in his chest as he lay dying, with only the knowledge of his nephews’ passing and the tears of a now-departed burglar to accompany him on what he had been sure would be his final journey to the halls of his ancestors. 

It was an emotion which at last broke the king from his reverie. 

“Naithmiri!” He shouted to the others. 

Retreat! 

And so they did, though Bifur in particular refused to be parted from the onslaught of attackers without a few final mighty blows. 

“’bout damned time,” Dwalin grumbled – and Thorin knew that his insistence on staying must have been foolish if even the one dwarrow amongst them who was always eager for a brawl would just as soon leave this foul place. 

But leave they did, running across the rickety and treacherous slats of the goblin bridge to join the waiting party of their friends – who stood in the now fully-fledged light of a waning summer – and leaving the creatures responsible for the death of their burglar to scream and gnash their teeth with useless fury behind them. 

The fresh air upon their sweating faces was like a gift, and all around them sunlight had begun to drip like golden paint through the trees, as if the world did not know that it ought to be ending, and was carrying on merrily regardless. 

Thorin, however, could not do the same. 

“It will be best if we leave this place at once,” Gandalf said definitively, before they’d even had a chance to catch more than a lungful of breath. “The goblins will come after us by nightfall, and we would be wise to place as much distance between ourselves and this damnable mountain range as possible.” 

“No,” said Thorin, quiet but firm. 

“I beg your pardon?” Gandalf demanded, as if he had never in his life been so contradicted, and wasn’t at all prepared for such an eventuality. 

“No,” the king repeated. 

Balin, wise as he was, sensed that – though wizards are incapable of any such mood that might be worth trifling with – Gandalf’s current temper was perhaps more unforgiving than any they had seen before. And so he stepped in to mediate. 

“My king,” he began, “perhaps it would be best to listen to Tharkûn on this, fo-”

“We cannot leave,” Thorin interrupted, his royal resolve gathering once more and lending him the strength he so desperately needed. “Bilbo may yet live, and to abandon a member of our company…” 

He trailed off, then, disarmed by the saddened look Balin was giving him. 

“Thorin…” Balin whispered, “you must know he does not.” 

“Aye,” Kili joined in, though his tone betrayed a good deal more anger. “He was soft and easily hurt, as you so delighted in reminding him. There is no knowing what terrible things lurk below Goblin-town, nor the lengths our friend must have fallen before he met them.” 

“Even so,” Thorin began, “Bilbo-”

“No.” interrupted a firm voice, which many of them were surprised to see belonged to the usually genial Bofur. “No, my king. He weren’t Bilbo to you. He was that to us…” and here, the dwarf seemed to struggle to maintain his expression of well-contained anger, for tears had begun to well in his eyes. “He was a friend. But ye offered him no such kindness, only your contempt. You will not see Master Baggins again, nor will we who truly cared for him.” 

Dwalin, by Thorin’s side, had a look about him that the king knew signaled imminent intervention on his behalf – for of the lot of them, Bofur, by nature of his birth, was perhaps the least permitted to take such a tone with royalty. But with a slight raise of his hand, Thorin ordered his friend to back down. 

“He is right,” he whispered, closing his eyes with shame at the way his voice trembled. 

And then he turned to once more address the company at large. 

“I have my reasons for my behavior,” he said carefully, torn between the anger and disappointment of his dearest friends and the constraints of the cosmic duty toward their fates which he had been appointed. “I have my reasons, though I regret that I cannot share them with you. But you must know…” 

He trailed off, looking once more at the small clearing of trees where his hobbit had once, so very long ago, stepped back into his life as if appearing out of thin air. But there was no such sign of him now, not even the faintest breeze which might mimic his laughter, or a flickering warmth in his heart that the meagerest of smiles might ignite. 

“… Surely, you must know,” he continued, “I mourn him too.” 

The dwarves seemed to accept that well enough – though as they began to right themselves and prepare for travel once more, they shared comforting looks and familiar closeness with each other, and none were offered to Thorin. 

And so he shouldered what was left of his belongings, though the lightness of his pack was hardly noticeable, borne down as he was by the responsibility he still held for a future that could no longer offer him any happiness. Instead there was only further grief, and such trials and tribulations as he could scarcely contemplate – some of which were not so distant from them now. 

The orcs would come. Their burglar would not. 

He was dead. 

******** 

Bilbo was not, in fact, dead. 

It was, however, very possible he would wish to be so upon waking, for the extent of bruising and bebotherment he had been dealt in his graceless fall would likely give him cause to grumble until the following Highday at the very least. For now, though, he was blissfully unaware of the encroaching headache which waited patiently for his return to the land of consciousness, for he was held in the tight grip of a rather forceful sleep.

And in his sleeping, he dreamed. 

It was a voice which he first recognized, as he dreamt. He knew quite well enough that he was not awake, for he found that he was in a place neither light nor dark, neither warm nor chilled, and such ridiculousness could only have a home in the vast lands of the imagined. 

But the voice… there was nothing ridiculous about that. 

“Wake, my child,” said the speaker, in a tone that was neither high nor low – though it belonged to a woman, of that he was sure. 

The words that were said, Bilbo realized at the slow pace that dreamers take, were not said in Westron. Nor were they said in Hobbitish, nor Sindarin, nor in the little of Quenya which he knew, nor even the littler of Khuzdul. This was none of the languages he had learnt, though he found he spoke it as fluently as if it were his very first. 

This was, of course, the very last bit of nonsense his patience would allow, for though he was currently lacking in any firm concept of just who he was and what it was he needed to be doing, he had a feeling that he ought to be doing it rather urgently. 

“Half a second, if you please.” He griped. And as soon as he wondered just where it was this speaker addressed him from, he found that he had eyes, which – upon further investigation – could open. 

And when he opened them, he saw. 

She was rapturously beautiful, in a wonderfully plain sort of way. “Beauty is as beauty does,” his father had often told him sagely, and though Bilbo had never quite understood just what that meant, he felt that it only made perfect sense now. She was beautiful in the way that a field of aspens was beautiful – for though they were pretty enough to look at, they also housed the larvae which grew to be the fly, which fed the bird, which sat atop their branches and serenaded the world with no thought of payment in return. She was beautiful in the way that a running river was beautiful – for though it might reflect the rays of the sun and offer light the chance to dance upon the leaves, it also foamed and frothed as it tucked pale pink eggs beneath its depths, which grew to be fish, which fed Bilbo well enough that he might live to dip his toes into the stream yet another day. 

And then she smiled at him, and he forgot himself completely. 

“Why do you fret, Bilbo Baggins?” she asked him, and suddenly there was warmth to be found all around him, at her briefest mention of his name. “What is it that you have lost?” 

He wondered at her asking that, for at the moment he hardly knew himself well enough to be missing anything in the first place. 

“Only my senses, it would seem,” he said – opting, in his hobbitishness, to react to such confusion by falling back on the instinct to be as good-natured and friendly as he could. “And…” 

Here, at the briefest of considerations that there might indeed be something for which he wanted, he found that the ever-present knowledge of himself which he had always taken for granted occurred to him once more. 

“…And my heart, I must admit,” he said finally. It seemed silly to tell her this, for he was certain she had a great many troubles over which she reigned, and the heartache of a lonely hobbit could not possibly be of much concern. 

But instead she looked sorrowful, or perhaps overjoyed, and she smiled and wept for him a moment before responding. 

“Your heart was never made for you,” she told him kindly, and though she was both great and small she was able to reach both up and down to cradle his cheek with a love such as he had not felt since his mother’s passing. “You cannot lose what is not yours.” 

“Still, though,” he replied, “I’ve become rather attached to it, I think you know, or perhaps it is attached to me... Either way, its fickle fumblings have been my most constant companion whenever I have felt that all else was lost. And the pain it brings me does not seem to dull, no matter how many chances you give me to master it.” 

She laughed and sighed in equal measure at what he told her, and Bilbo found that he was a little surprised at not being more affronted by either reaction. 

“Nothing my husband creates is easily led,” she said, “but to master your heart is not the point, Bilbo Baggins. Just the opposite.” 

He frowned at her ambiguity, which reminded him oddly of his dear and infuriating friend Gandalf. And though he somehow felt that his most common plea to the wizard would be similarly useless here, he intended to ask that she speak more plainly. 

Only he knew, then, that this vision of his was fading. And as his maker waved him farewell and welcome in simultaneity, he awoke as all dreamers do – which is to say, having already done it. 

And sure enough, almost as immediately as he regained consciousness he wished to banish it from himself forever, for to name the parts of his body which didn’t ache would take far less time than the reverse, and likely wouldn’t even require all of his fingers. 

Did he have all his fingers, still? 

It was dreadfully dark, wherever he was, and he could not hope to see the end of his own nose no matter how long he squinted. But after a moment of wiggling and tapping, and groaning and slapping, he found he was fairly certain that all of his extremities were more or less present. 

He looked upward, then – or, at least, he was fairly certain it was upward, though in the grip of such lightless obscurity it was truly hard to tell just which way his neck was craning, and he was as like to be looking at his own feet as he was toward the stars. 

The stars. Oh, but of course! 

It was then that he recalled the gift which had been pressed into his hands by a servant of the Lady Galadriel, all those days ago when they had rested so comfortably in the Last Homely House. 

“It is the light of Earendil,” explained the fair elf, with as much confusion as respect, “our greatest star. My lady hopes it will guide you even in the darkest of places, when all other lights go out.” 

Certainly there were few places so dark as this, Bilbo thought, and he pulled the small phial from his waistcoat, greatly relieved to find that – delicate as it appeared- it had not been broken. 

Then as quickly as he had wished for light, he found that it was all around him. And just as he had suspected, his body parts were all where they ought to be. 

Disconcertingly, however, there were a great deal of other body parts all around him, where they certainly oughtn’t. 

He stifled a gasp, though the gentle sound of what little of it escaped still trembled through the cavern of blackened stone that surrounded him, and he did his best to both investigate and resolutely ignore the carnage around him in equal measure. 

Some of the remains appeared to be rather old, and were picked clean to the bone by gnawing and indelicate teeth. Nine of them, he imagined, for he felt he knew quite well just what it was that might only lurk around the corner. 

A great many of the carcasses, however, appeared to be rather new. In fact, he might’ve wagered a guess that they had fallen down right alongside him, if he hadn’t been rather sure that made no sense at all. 

He worried, then, what had become of the dwarves. He hadn’t been with them nearly as long the first time around, and therefore had no idea whether their trajectory in escape had been at all promising. They had been so close to freedom that Bilbo had caught a whiff of fresh morning air through the blinding stench of goblin, before he had been cast down to these depths where everything smelled – somehow – a great deal worse. But surely the dwarves must have made it out alive, for they had a wizard on their side. 

He reassured himself of this, as he looked once more at the goblin corpses that littered the crevasse in which he found himself. But he knew that he did not quite believe it, for a great many of these creatures that lay before him had received terrible injuries, which surely were not merely the result of a fall that even a little hobbit could survive. And surely that indicated a fight. 

But there was no use in worrying about it now, he reasoned with himself. For one of the most important parts of this whole confounded journey was in his ending up in the goblin tunnels to begin with, and through some stroke of luck he had managed to blunder his way into them without much fuss. Relatively speaking, anyway. 

It was then that he heard a scratching and skittering in the distant passages beyond him, and as he ducked frantically behind a rock, he extinguished the little bottle of starlight that had felt like his only source of hope in the terrible gloom. 

“-So juicy sweet  
For us to eat  
We do not wish   
To catch a fish  
With all these beasts  
A goblin feast!” 

A throaty cackle of delighted amusement accompanied the toneless singing, which became louder and louder as the creature Gollum approached the place where Bilbo hid. 

It was an exceedingly odd thing for Bilbo, to know that the being whose unclever but powerful involvement had once decided the very fate of Middle Earth was now scrambling in the slime and damp only a short distance away, without a care in the world. He hated and feared and pitied the poor fool in equal measure, for the power of that which he bore had corrupted what seemed to be a feeble but well-meaning heart. 

But corrupt it already was, and he would not let himself forget that. Poor young Frodo had once paid the price for his own decision to spare Gollum, and it would be unwise to make the same mistake again. 

And yet… 

As Bilbo peered carefully from his hiding place, and saw what little was illuminated by the creature’s lamplike eyes, he could not help the sense of sympathy which his mind so readily rebuked. Gollum’s movements were truly grotesque – for he was dancing gleefully as he dragged along two goblin corpses at once, not caring for the trails of blood and disgusting debris which followed him to his hiding place. But grotesqueness and evil were hardly the same, and though Bilbo had at this point slain no small number of malicious creatures – for a hobbit, anyway – none of those deaths had felt quite as much like they were done in cold blood as would the death of poor Smeagol. 

Bilbo had long ago made up his mind, and had further underlined the point twice in his notebook, that he would in fact slay Gollum. But when he was faced with the opportunity to do so, he knew in his heart that he had never truly meant to at all. For this was a world in which the Nazgul would never come to the Shire at the creature’s tortured cry of “Shire! Baggins!”... This was a world in which Frodo would have two parents who loved him for a very long time – tucked safely into the home they had inherited from that odd adventuring cousin of theirs, with his eccentric but emphatic condition that they were never to attempt to swim or boat or even wade anywhere for as long as they lived. This was, indeed, a world where Frodo had not yet been born, and when at last he was it would be into a world where he would keep every one of his ten fingers, as well as the easy smile he had been graced with. 

So it was that Bilbo realized he did not wish to kill the Gollum of this universe, he wished to kill the Gollum of another, and he would not hold such a pitiful creature accountable for sins he had not yet had the chance to commit. 

But he would not trust him, either. Of course not. Bilbo may be altogether more kind than he was wise, but that did not make him foolish. 

And so he crept slowly behind Gollum at as great a distance as he could manage without losing the only light in those dreadful caves altogether. And as he stepped so carefully across stone and slime – and a good many other things which he was grateful not to be able to identify – he found that he was just the slightest bit proud of his own bravery, for the Bilbo who had met with Gollum the first time had hardly been capable of sneaking up on three boisterous cave trolls who had hardly shared a single stone’s-worth of brains between them. 

He continued on like that for a long while, sometimes only led by the echoing unskilled refrains of Gollum’s dinner song, as they echoed from dark places which seemed to have no end and showed him the way. 

“We don’t like feets  
But meats is meats!  
And so we beg  
For lots of leg  
When treats fall down  
From Goblin-town!” 

And so on, and so forth, Gollum went on. 

Eventually Bilbo’s eyes began to adjust to the darkness around him, and he found that it was not so impenetrable after all. And it was just as well, for it was only shortly thereafter that the narrow caves which he so carefully navigated opened up all at once, to reveal the underground lake, and the island in the middle of it where the creature Gollum lived. 

And just beyond that, he knew… he hoped… was the Ring. 

Gollum seemed, for all intents and purposes, entirely unaware that he had a visitor in his most humble of abodes, and Bilbo would have sighed in relief if he hadn’t thought even that small sound might put the paranoid creature on high alert. Instead, he only inched as slowly and carefully as he could manage toward the little alcove where the One Ring had surely been lost, as he did his best to ignore the horrible slurping and snapping noises that rippled to him over the water as his host indulged himself in one of his favorite meals. 

After what felt like an entire Age, Bilbo at last reached the small shelf of rock he would never be quite so fortunate as to forget, and with as much sorrow as relief he found that a familiar shimmer was indeed there to be seen at his feet. 

There, at last, was his Ring. 

He very nearly couldn’t convince himself to put it on – for though he had faced trolls and orcs and goblins once more, and had met so many old friends anew, it was this moment which truly made him realize that he really was to do it all again. He had been through a great deal in his life… Such heartbreak and sorrow that even upon his death, all those years later, there had still been some stories to which he had dared not give voice. They defied description, and indeed it had felt almost as if attempting to confine them to the simplicity of speech was a desecration. He had longed for and missed these friends of his every day for the rest of his life, but he did not think he ever would have wished to relive their experiences. 

Though, would he? Had he? 

He did not know by what force it was that he found himself returned, and he felt it was unwise to guess. His mother had once warned him that to try and understand the makers in terms of absolutes was to try to put the Valar in a box, but in his subsequent dealings with wizards, and certain unnamed elves, and every other manner of bewildering low-level eternal beings he had managed to meet, he had found that even that admonishment did not quite do it justice. It was not simply that the Valar would not be confined to a box, but rather that they had in fact made the box in the first place, and had thought it would be funny to give it to Bilbo just to tempt him, and really there was no box at all, and quite possibly there was no Bilbo… It was all very confusing, and as with most hobbits, he preferred not to dwell on it. 

Still, it seemed Yavanna was involved, in some small part – although he wouldn’t dare to bet money on it. 

And it also seemed, he realized then, that his pondering such great and unknowable questions was surely only an attempt to stall himself from the inevitable, for the Ring still sat there – cold and gleaming as ever – and in the silence Bilbo could faintly hear it call to him. 

Silence? 

Oh dear. 

He dove for the Ring, and had only just managed to put it on before the faint and foggy world that enshrouded him with its presence revealed the lurking figure of Gollum, who had begun to creep towards him in the dark. 

Slowly – oh so slowly, and very carefully – Bilbo retreated further into the alcove, pinning himself against the stone and doing his best not even to breath, in the hopes that Gollum only suspected he was there and was not entirely sure. 

As the creature investigated and excavated and sniffed about the area ever closer to him, hardly caring as he skinned his knees and scraped his elbows on protruding rocks, the Ring began to whisper. 

“Baggins… Once more,” it said. 

And Bilbo was filled with terrible dread as he realized that his tolerance for the horrid thing had not been renewed with his newfound life, for it felt as if he were being greeted by an old and untrusted friend. 

The Ring never said anything to him that he did not already know, and indeed a part of him realized that the things it whispered to him only came from his own heart. For now, it made sweet promises of love and loyalty, and vowed that he who wielded the One Ring in all its true power could never be beneath the notice of kings. That there were none who could hope to spurn him, and there would be no death or sorrow lest he should command it. 

And just as part of him knew that these thoughts were his own, another much smaller part of him was comforted by them. 

This was in itself nearly enough to cause Bilbo to wrench the Ring from his finger, and it was only in the nick of time that Gollum became distracted by the splash of a fish landing on the shore a distance away, and scampered off for some scrumptious dessert. 

After waiting for what was hardly a moment to make sure he hadn’t been tricked, Bilbo then at last removed the band with a muffled sigh, which was more an expression of exhaustion than relief. In his waning years, he had reminded himself quite well of all that was true and terrible about his Ring, but he had not quite managed to forget all that had made it so tempting to him to begin with. The promises it made were hollow, but they were still a sight better than a future with no promises at all. 

But the goblin caves were not the time nor place for such ponderings, he knew, and after only a short rest, he gathered his wits and made his escape. 

He did not dare to wear the Ring again, which likely made his journey from the depths of the mountain last thrice as long. But neither did he again encounter Gollum, and by the time Bilbo stepped into the cool night air and allowed himself the briefest of moments to bask in the gathering light of the stars, he felt certain that the creature would continue to live out the rest of his days in the darkness below, never knowing just who or what had robbed him, and never feeling the warmth of sunlight. 

**** 

Night had fallen over the dwarves, as heavy as an axe. This night was no ordinary one, for it was not simply the absence of day, but rather its own beast altogether. The darkness of it had clung to their clothes and run its fingers through their beards with the breeze, and even the very idea of happiness and light seemed obscured from them. It was not the sort of darkness that seemed to precede light - the kind that existed only to make you more grateful when the sun decided to rise again and all the nastiest of the earth’s creatures slunk once more into their hiding places. It was instead the sort of darkness that threatened to swallow any idea of light whole, and in fact made you doubt - somewhere, in the most vulnerable part of your mind - whether the sun had ever actually existed to begin with. It was the sort of darkness you could look at, and it would look back. 

Death had also fallen over them, as heavy as the night. There is no ordinary death, for death is not simply the absence of life. But this one was as terrible as any other the dwarves had ever known - and, though many of them had only been alive for a century or so, they had between the lot of them known a great deal. 

To their king, especially, it seemed as if the sun would never rise again. He felt as if the small and secret place the hobbit had so long occupied in his heart had now gone cold, and it nipped bitterly at his chest with every jostling breath he took. He despised himself for breathing, when Bilbo did not. 

And in truth, he knew the sun would, in fact, creep over the horizon with the dawn. But he knew with equal conviction that it would hardly matter - for there was now a part of him that would never again know warmth.

Yet still, he could not cry. 

They had escaped Azog and his minions, somehow or another, though Thorin had once again been felled by the bane of his people before he could exact any such revenge as he felt he was owed. And as he awoke on the carrock, and asked for the burglar as he once had before, what few of his kinsmen would meet his eyes had only done so with sadness. 

But still, as he presently watched what remained of his company settle for the night into the overlarge and odd home of Beorn the Skin-Changer, Thorin found that such sadness yet escaped him. He had held a kernel of grief in his heart from the moment he had wrenched himself from the final throes of his goldsickness to find that he had damaged his relationship with his little friend in ways he could never hope to repair. And that kernel had sprouted, slightly, when he had awoken in this new world, and realized that even with this greatest of gifts – this chance at amendment for his many and terrible mistakes – to attempt to court the hobbit he loved, who should not love him, would be unforgivably selfish. But even now, it had not yet bloomed in full, but he knew when it did it would wrap him up entirely in its foliage, and he felt there would be no escape. 

For now, though, there was only a deep regret – and beyond that, there was a terrible anger. Anger at the goblin king, and every member of his kin, for what had been taken from him. Anger at his maker, for granting him twice a life never once deserved, when Bilbo was only to wiped cleanly from this earth as if he were not one of the most wonderful things ever to trod upon it. And anger at himself most of all, for all the foolish things he had ever said to the one he loved, and for every second that had not been spent at his side. 

He had known a great deal about Bilbo, once. And he would have liked to know it all again. But now, there was no hope. 

As he nestled into his bedroll, Thorin did his best not to notice the dwarrow who sat in clusters all around him – tired, but yet unwilling to feign any attempt at sleep. They made cozy beds of straw, which was scattered all around this place, and they watched the many animals around them carefully – though they hardly moved, only looking at the lot of them with far-too-intelligent eyes. Even so, this was among the coziest of resting places the road might provide, and they had known far worse already. 

But that was not what denied them sleep. No, their nights thus far – whether in fair weather or foul, with soft beds awaiting or only icy stone – had always been spent with stories and merrymaking around the campfire, for dwarves as whole were hardly able to consider their day complete without finding something to cheer about. But though their raucous singing had always been nigh-deafening, their silence now seemed doubly so. 

On the day that he died Bilbo Baggins was fifty-three. Thorin doubted he would ever forgive himself for that fact. 

The next morning did, in fact, dare to dawn as bright and early as ever it had before, though this seemed to impress none of their group in the least. 

Kili, Thorin was enormously relieved to find, had softened to him considerably, after a quiet talk with Balin about subjects which the king preferred his curiosity not linger on. In fact, his nephew had approached him immediately after, and with a seriousness that did not suit his young face he had put a hand on Thorin’s shoulder, and had tapped their foreheads together lightly in an expression of sympathy, or perhaps forgiveness. 

The lad was growing up so much faster than he had ever expected. 

As for the rest of his companions, a good many of them had simply turned to mourning, and it was only a handful – such as Nori, and little Ori, and Bifur, and Bofur most especially – who still subjected him to their baleful glares. 

He did not particularly enjoy it, but neither did he wholly blame them… 

“Are ye alright, laddie?” Balin’s familiar voice cut through his reverie, as his old and dearly trusted friend stooped to sit next to where Thorin had banished himself to the far corner, away from the rest. 

He meant to respond, but Thorin found that he could not lie so brazenly to a dwarrow who at times knew him better than he perhaps knew himself. And so he simply remained silent, and offered only a vague nod. 

Balin hummed in understanding, as if nothing Thorin might struggle to say could ever possibly surprise him, and it was this very comfort that caused him to blurt out what he had never meant to reveal. 

“I loved him,” he said quickly, as if worried he might stop himself before he could finish. 

Rather than reacting with any of the shock or confusion he ought to have, though, his friend only offered a kind but sorrowful smile. 

“I know,” Balin said quietly. 

“You…” began Thorin, filled with confusion. “You knew? How? I never spoke a word of it. I would sooner have assumed you thought me to hate him, for all that my mistreatment. ” 

“I will not lie to you, my king, and say that you have at all times behaved admirably,” Balin replied diplomatically. “But I know you far too well to ever think you unkind, and I have faith that you had your reasons.” 

It was far greater deference than he altogether deserved, but it was still yet a relief to hear it. 

“I do,” said Thorin. “I did. I feared…” and here he put his head in his hands, wishing – for just a moment – that the world could be blocked from his view, and that the truth was not so terrible a thing to speak. “I feared a great many things, but his understanding most of all. I wished to protect him, and instead I only became that from which he needed saving… I am a fool.” 

Balin laughed – just once, a short exhalation – before putting a comforting hand on his arm. 

“We are all fools in some way,” he said, “to be a fool for love is not so terrible.” 

It was banal, and hardly absolved Thorin of all that he had done. But this too was said with such kindness as he felt he did not deserve, and it soothed him slightly to hear it. 

“How did you know?” he asked, not wanting this grace to end. 

Balin was silent for a moment, and Thorin lifted his head from his bereaved posture, only to discover that the old dwarf appeared to be giving the question some true contemplation. 

“I feel I am right in saying,” he began at last, “that you loved him from the very first moment you laid eyes on him. Am I right?” 

Thorin nodded, surprised at having been seen through so easily. 

“I thought as much,” Balin said. “I might have noticed it then, only the first overtures of love are always characterized by the glimmer of hope, and it seems to me that you never had any… I will not pry into your reasons, if you do not wish to tell me. But I will tell you that I suspected it from the moment you greeted him with such esteem the following day, though it was not until we began our journey in earnest that I felt it was confirmed.” 

“Oh?” asked Thorin, wondering what it was he could possibly have done that might have hinted at anything but contempt for the smallest and most fragile member of their party. 

“Yes,” Balin replied, nodding his head as he considered. “Yes, I believe it wasn’t until we truly became a company, and not a mere assembly of dwarves and hobbit, that I knew my suspicions were correct. You see…” and here he trailed off, as if considering his words carefully. 

“I have known you all your life, Thorin. You have always been of royal blood, of course, and you have never questioned the regard you have received because of that, unless you found it lacking…. And you have always been served first at mealtimes.” 

Thorin turned to him again, now thoroughly confused. 

But Balin only continued, as if he knew what he was about. 

“You have always been served first, and I’ve never known you to question that. But that very first day on the road, and for every day after, upon being handed your plate by Bombur you only ever passed it along to our burglar and waited for another. That is love.” 

Thorin felt his brows crease, for in truth he did not understand his friend’s assertion in the least. 

“That is not love,” he said with certainty. “Love is to rend mountains in twain at the slightest behest of the other half which makes you whole. It is to die with and for them. It is a descriptor which I admit I wholly do not deserve.” 

“Those things are not love, Thorin,” Balin replied, with a patience the king recognized well enough in having known him all these years and frustrated him for just as many. “Those are grand declarations. They are merely stories, and ones no one would ever want to be true, at that. To love is to fill up another’s canteen, as well as your own. It’s to slow your pace as you cross cliffsides when you know the one you walk with might enjoy the view… To climb the most treacherous pass and pluck the fairest rose atop it, which will never grow again? That is a grand declaration. But to spend every day watching the roadside for little daisies and forget-me-nots in the hopes that you might leave them silently upon his bedroll? That is love, my king...” 

Balin trailed off for a moment, here, but Thorin knew him well enough to recognize that he was not quite done, and was only thinking a moment more. 

“Bilbo was many things,” his friend said finally, “but most especially he was a hobbit, which was something he never let any of us forget. And I feel that to give him the chance to eat before you yourself ever took a bite was not only to voice your love, but to tell him in his own language. I do not think you feared his understanding as much as you accuse yourself of. Perhaps you even hoped for it.” 

It was a startling thing to consider, but Thorin found that he could not deny it. 

Balin, eldest son of Fundin, had always been among the wisest of dwarrow – indeed, the wisest of people – whom Thorin had ever known. Even in their shared youth, he had possessed an unassuming intelligence and a sense of empathy that was as sharp and as true as any dwarven blade. At the time, in his adolescent foolishness, he had only ever been jealous of that fact. Now, however, he considered himself boundlessly blessed to simply have the dwarf at his side, as a most trusted advisor. 

Luckily, he was spared from the impulse to make any such sentiments known, as Gandalf had at long last decided to abandon the corner from which he had spent the morning puffing out ring after wobbling ring of pipe smoke, and glowering at the whole lot of them as if it were they who had conspired to lose him his hobbit. 

“Thorin Oakenshield!” the wizard barked grumpily. “I think it is at last time for us to greet our host. You must pray that we live to see the end of our pleasantries, although I do not find myself particularly overburdened with hope.” 

“Greet the skin-changer?” Thorin asked in shock, for last time Gandalf had not let him get anywhere near the bear of a man until he had been properly treated with. Last time, he had taken… 

Bilbo.

“Yes,” Gandalf responded grumpily, making it rather clear just what it was he thought of dwarven intelligence at having been asked the question at all. “Now, this will require some delicate handling, and we ought to tread very carefully, which is why you must leave the talking to me. The last person to startle him was torn quite to shreds…” 

At hearing this, every dwarf among them but Thorin gasped, and began to chatter quietly to each other. 

“Now the rest of you,” Gandalf continued, seeming slightly cheered at having caused such a fuss with his words alone, “must wait for my signal, for we will have little hope if we overcrowd him. And you must only come out in pairs. Come, Master Oakenshield. Our innkeeper awaits.” 

Thorin rose, of course, and followed the wizard out into the courtyard in silence. And thus he would have remained, had he not noticed that the old man was walking at a much slower pace than ever he had before, and was fiddling with the end of his staff as if there were some possibility of a splinter in the smooth and polished wood. 

“You’re nervous,” he stated bluntly. 

“Nervous?” blustered Gandalf. “Now then, don’t be ridiculous.” 

This would likely have been a much more effective argument, if it had not been accented by the swoosh and thud of an enormous ax in the distance, and a slight wince from the wizard at hearing it. 

As they rounded the corner, the great form of Beorn came into view – for he was great, and there was no other way to describe it. 

“Good morning!” called Gandalf, with far more friendliness than he had ever offered the dwarves. 

Swoosh! Thud. 

The enormous man ignored them. 

Thorin thought, with some vindictive pleasure, that being so very much shorter than the one you wished to converse with must be unusual for Gandalf, and had likely even put him on edge. 

“Good morning!” The wizard insisted (though, of course, it wasn’t).

This, at least, managed to finally catch the attention of the skin-changer, though he did not even bother to turn as he addressed them. 

“Who are you?” he asked – with every indication that he expected their answer would not interest him – over his hairy shoulder, as he began to collect the massive logs he had so easily split in two. 

“I’m Gandalf,” replied the wizard with confidence, as if this was likely to help. 

“Gandalf the Grey,” he added momentarily, at receiving no reaction. 

“Never heard of him.” Beorn replied with a shrug, and he then spat upon the ground in a way that was not entirely clear, and indicated either enormous insult or residual lettuce. 

Thorin did not remember why it was he had not enjoyed the skin-changer so much last time, for he was unlikely to encounter anything in all the rest of his life which he would find quite so entertaining as the tight pinch of annoyance in Gandalf’s eyes at not being recognized. 

“I’m a wizard,” the old man provided at last, with as much grace as he could muster. “Perhaps you know my good cousin, Radagast the Brown? He resides in Rhosgobel, only a short distance from here, at the edge of the Greenwood…” 

“What do you want, wizard?” Beorn demanded. “And why do you bring me a dwarf. I do not like dwarves.” 

Gandalf began to sputter out an explanation, but as much as his flustered nervousness amused Thorin, he found he did not have the patience to carry out any such pleasantries much longer. Not today. 

“You may perhaps dislike dwarves, o’ skin-changer,” he interrupted with a small bow, “but I am certain you dislike orcs far more. My company and I have only sought refuge in your halls, as we were attacked by a horde of the scum which have infested Moria.” 

“Company?” Asked Beorn, who had of course latched on to the least important part of his statement. “Do you call a wizard and a tiny dwarf a company?” 

“Well-” began Gandalf a bit shakily, but Thorin only interrupted him once more. 

“I call thirteen dwarves a company, and I see no reason to lie to you about the fact,” he offered plainly, ignoring Gandalf’s enormous glare. Beorn reacted to his admission by bunching his rather bushy eyebrows together, in what was either consideration or annoyance. 

“I can introduce you to them, if you would like to meet them.” Thorin continued. 

“I do not like to meet dwarves,” grunted Beorn, “but you will introduce me regardless.” 

Thorin took the statement as the greatest encouragement he was likely to receive, and waved his hand in the vague direction of the window which he knew the dwarves were all clamoring to peer out of, signaling that two of them ought to join. 

Quickly enough, Dwalin and Balin exited the house, giving deep bows after their introductions, and looking calm as you please – though of course they were not. 

And then after came Óin and Glóin, and Ori and Dori, and Fili and Kili, and then – in their rush to get the whole ordeal over with – Bifur, Bofur, Nori, and Bombur spilled out all at once. 

Beorn, for his part, had not moved a mite in all the time they had greeted him. Not to return any of the gracious bows he had received, but neither to attack them in any way, and so Thorin considered them all very lucky. 

“That’s the lot of them, I believe,” Gandalf said, trying to regain some semblance of control over the situation. “We have only just made it away from Goblin-town – with the help of the eagles, you know – and we have since lost most of our travelling packs, and all of our food, and-” 

“And will this story take all day?” asked Beorn, in a tone that was not so much aggressively rude as simply curious. 

“Ah, no,” replied Gandalf, “I shouldn’t imagine so. It is a long one, of course, but not so long as all that.” 

“Depending on who is telling it,” Thorin grumbled. 

“And why do you not tell it then, little dwarf?” asked Beorn. “Is it a good one?” 

Thorin, who usually would have responded to such a descriptor with a declaration that he would have the beard of the one who said it, only frowned – for though he had long since resigned himself to being a fool, he was hardly stupid. 

“No, it is not,” he replied. “And indeed you have caught us in the lowest point of it.” 

Beorn frowned in return. “So you bring me no story, no entertainment, and only a pack of orcs on your tail?” He growled. “Dwarves…”

“Not just so!” Gandalf leapt to interject. “If our story is not to Master Oakenshield’s liking, he could surely entertain you with something else. A song, perhaps?” 

“A song…” repeated Beorn, looking rather doubtful. 

“Why, yes!” Gandalf exclaimed. “Dwarves may lock themselves up tight in their mountains, and often refuse to let anyone in, but beneath such stone and echoing throughout all their glorious caverns there is great music to be found, and those who are lucky enough to hear it are considered very blessed indeed!” 

This was, of course, an exaggeration, for one only had only to visit a pub on more than one occasion to eventually encounter some rather drunken renditions of every dwarvish song allowed to be known to Men, as well as several that weren’t. But Gandalf was a wizard, of course, and that meant that the truth was whatever it most pleased him to say at the moment, so Thorin did not interject. 

“Very well,” Beorn acquiesced, “let me hear your dwarven music, and I will decide whether to let you live or die.” 

Several the dwarves looked quite nervous at such a casually-delivered decree, but they began to hum their parts to the song they all knew was coming well enough regardless. 

And Thorin, meanwhile, only sang: 

“Far over the misty mountains cold  
To dungeons deep and caverns old  
We must away ere break of day  
To find our long-forgotten gold

Farther still, where once we found  
In hobbit hole, there underground   
A faithful friend, whose help did lend  
A little soul, to which I’m bound”

At hearing the words they had expected so changed, many of the dwarves faltered in their humming, but Balin and Dwalin, and Fili and Kili, carried the tune on regardless. 

And so Thorin continued:

“When first I stood upon his door   
I felt the half my whole called for   
Yet I resist, with clench-ed fist  
For I knew well what lay in store

With foes ahead, behind us dread   
I felt the weight of things unsaid  
With naught to give, but hope he’d live  
I offered him silence instead

A babbling brook is ne’er so deep  
So depthless devotion I too did keep  
And be it grim, were it for him  
There’s no abyss I would not leap

And thus I wished that he would flee  
For once my heart and soul agree  
That had he lived, I could forgive  
His smile was never meant for me

But Fate’s hand is not so kind   
And now I’m cursed to wander blind   
For though he’s left, one final theft:   
He took the heart that was not mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully you all don't mind how long these chapters are, I just start them with an idea of where they'll end and keep writing until I get there... Anyway, thank you, as always, to everyone who comments! I don't respond to many of them, because I often have nothing interesting to say besides 'thanks!' which feels insufficient, and the pressure of making sure I get to all of them is a little overwhelming. But I really do appreciate every one I get, long or short, and plenty of them have made me happy enough that I'll go back and reread them before starting a new chapter. Hope you're all staying safe out there, and thank you for reading


	11. Chapter 11

Wizards were odd sorts of fellows, by and large. And Radagast the Brown was an odd sort of wizard. 

Whereas most of his kind would not be content without sticking their noses into every darkened corner of the world until the whole thing was full to the brim with their meddling and magic, he instead preferred to keep his sniffer fresh for more important things - such as exhaling enormous amounts of pipe smoke, and knowing when it was about to rain. 

It should be mentioned that wizards, as a general rule, view the world as having only two types of inhabitants: other wizards, and everyone else. Other wizards - and the assorted members of the Maiar, whom they felt were not important enough to name, but still too important to ignore - were regarded as esteemed allies, or as more greatly esteemed threats. Everyone else, on the other hand, may only hope to be entertaining (although whether this was due to their witticism, or to how it was they behaved when they were turned abruptly into a black-tailed jackrabbit, depended entirely upon which wizard it was you asked). 

Regardless, they tended to be well-liked on the whole, or at least well-put-up-with, and those that were not were well-avoided. Indeed, the majority of their shortcomings were instead generally thought to be the fault of the elves, who had named them “Istari” or “those who know” upon their arrival, which most of the people of Middle Earth seemed to agree had inflated their heads to such an extent that there wasn’t much room up there for common sense. Ask a wizard for a cup of tea – it was often said – and they’d set some water to boiling, search for an appropriate blend, begin to wonder about the origins of tea-making, go on to further wonder about the origins of making anything at all, and would then leave on a grand adventure to figure it all out before the kettle had even begun to whistle. This was a common yarn amongst all the races of Middle Earth, except for hobbits (who also claimed that when they got back around to it wizards would always stick the teabag in after they poured the water, which was sacrilege) and orcs (who did not like tea). 

Still, though, it was to be admitted that while they weren’t much use around the house, the Istari had considerable prowess in such things as standing atop large towers while casting fireballs at those below, and at most forms of card games as well. And through the use of one or the other, they tended to earn the respect of the majority of those whom they encountered. 

Radagast, however, was known by those whose job it was to know him best as being one entirely lacking in any such definitive skills to set him thus apart (and as lacking in a good deal of general cognition, to boot). He was not reckless or foolish enough to have done anything that might have taught him to be exceptionally wise, and he seemed to staunchly resist the urge to behave logically no matter how dire the crisis at hand. It was therefore agreed that he was excellently suited for the world of politics, but he refused to involve himself in it, for he was infuriatingly short on ambition as well. He was, instead, content to spend his many days in a little hut in Rhosgobel, at the western edge of Greenwood Forest, alone and unbebothered. 

Bilbo – for it is Bilbo with whom we still journey – knew all of this quite well, having met the Brown Wizard properly a handful of times during his years spent with the elves, and even having understood him long enough to maintain a conversation once or twice. And the hobbit had found him to be a kindly sort, if a bit curious. However, it would not do to ignore the fact that Gandalf – who liked the little fellow well enough – still seemed to feel that Radagast had the infuriating tendency to spend his sentences dancing around their point, rather as if they were the Shire’s grand Party Tree rather than something so immediately critical as a horde of orcs bearing down on your tail. And there were few who knew Gandalf who would not agree that if he of all people thought you could benefit from a little more directness, there was truly no saving you. 

Still, Bilbo had long since resigned himself to the presence of wizards, for it seemed to him that to know them was very much the same thing as tempering chocolate. Often infuriating, and requiring far more effort than seemed reasonable, but it was simply something that must be done in order to get the right kind of shine out of life. Which was fitting, as right now Bilbo felt there was very little that glimmered in his world, and what did was only accursed gold. 

His mother had often told him (in days long past, when jamming his finger in the gate had seemed like the very worst of what the world could ever offer him) that things always looked better in the morning. He had never found this to be quite true, but the morning always brought breakfast, and at least that was something. However, on that very day – as the sun rose in the east and began to spill its delicate light on the waiting world – it carried alongside it no new hope for his uncertain past and unsteady future, and similarly no breakfast at all. 

Still, he thought – as he began to climb down from the little shelter he had made himself to spend the night – there was something to be said for being a very small person waking up in a very large tree. Normally he would not have bothered to hide himself so, for even prior to having lost his bedroll he had long since lost his sensible standards, and he found that these days – especially with the easy autonomy of his re-instilled youth – the ground suited him fine. But knowing, as he did, that the orcs and goblins must surely be near, he had thought it best to hide himself somewhere safe and unseen as he waited for darkness to finally give way to dawn. 

And in doing so, he discovered that there was something distinctly odd, and perhaps even magical, about watching the earth come to life without having your feet firmly planted on it. For as the sun first began to announce its impending arrival with a soft blue glow that settled over the sleeping forest like a blanket, Bilbo had looked around himself to discover that nothing seemed to be just quite what it was. His little perch there in the crook of a tree was now surely twice as long a fall as it had been when first he’d climbed it. And though the world was yet still and silent, the tangled roots of each overturned elm had suddenly become the shadowy outline of a goblin, and every small rustling sigh of the wind which combed its careless fingers though the leaves surely harkened the silent approach of a warg. 

But as true sunlight joined him once more, and the world began to warm, he could at last see every leaf and rock upon the ground beneath him, and he found that he was only ever as far from it as he’d thought. Somehow, once more, branches were only branches, and stone was only stone. It was not that everything became somehow better with the arrival of daylight, but rather that things were exactly what they were, and promised to remain so. 

And they kept that promise for a good long while, until at last in his subsequent wandering he reached the edge of the Mirkwood, where no matter the hour everything that breathed and skittered between the ageless growths seemed determined to be just what it wasn’t, and there were further still plenty of things that breathed and skittered which oughtn’t be doing it all. 

It had been a small comfort to Bilbo, that he had then been able to retrieve the little notebook and pen which his goblins captors had not thought important enough to dispose of, and check off the following: 

1\. Find the Ring  
3\. Escape the tunnels

He had not completed “2. Deal with Gollum” of course, but he found he still did not regret his decision in that regard half as much as he had secretly suspected he might, and to run a dissenting line through the abandoned chore did not dampen his spirits in the least. 

Now, however – as he stood before the enormous and unending shadows which the forest seemed to cast in every direction at once with little regard for the whims of sunlight – he felt with uncomfortable certainty that certainty itself had abandoned him. Every footstep he had taken thus far had been steadily guided by the prints he had left when last he’d been there. Now, though, like a traveler in a snowstorm, he found that what had once been a familiar trail was no long recognizable as anything at all, and he had stepped into a terrain that was wholly unfamiliar to him. His dwarves were out there somewhere, he hoped, but in the best of scenarios they had once more arrived at Beorn’s house, and that was much farther a distance to be travelled by a lone hobbit on foot than once it had seemed on the back of a great eagle. 

Still, it would be yet a great deal farther than that if his feet never got to walking at all, he knew, and it was with the uninspiring attempt to rally himself that he had struck out in some vague direction southward, with the intention of following the treeline as closely as he dared until something or another began to feel familiar. 

In truth, it had been the Brown Wizard who at last found him, rather than the other way around. Or, perhaps more accurately: it had been Radagast who had noticed his presence first, and had done his utmost to avoid it, while it was Bilbo who had eventually cottoned on to the deception and discovered him anyway. 

“What a curious smell that is,” he had remarked to himself, after following the edge of the Mirkwood for what had equally seemed to be a few minutes and an entire lifetime. 

And in fairness to him, it certainly was. For wafting in the warm summer wind was a scent which held the sweetness of sap and honey, blended with the rich and earthy musk of wet bark and moistened dirt, and floating above all that was the faintest whiff of the same sulfuric smell which followed after Gandalf any time he performed such magic as might be considered particularly impressive to those who knew very little on the subject. To his great credit, Bilbo suspected it to be exactly what it was, and he struck out a few tentative strides into the darkened forest, in the hopes of finding help. 

“Master Radagast?” He called out, the sound of his little voice echoing strangely through the densely-growing trees, and causing a bird to flit off in fear at the eerie silence to which it was accustomed being so disturbed. 

“Master Radagast?” He shouted again, noting that the smell grew stronger as he ventured further from the light of the outside world which grew fainter and fainter at his back. 

And yet still there was nothing. But Bilbo was by and large a clever sort, as you should well know by now, and as such he did not miss the slight quivering of a nearby blackberry brush, where it appeared something or another of somewhat significant size was carefully eating the fruits from a hiding place deep within. 

“O Brown Wizard!” He called out, willing to give the odd Istari one final chance for what might approach being a dignified entrance. “I have just spoken to Yavanna, and I could surely use your help.” 

There was a pause then, and thereafter a great sigh which sent tremors from the very heart of the thick brambles to the tips of their pointed leaves. And with much ado, and an even greater amount of grumbling, Radagast the Brown emerged from his hiding place – berries held tightly in his hand, a moth flitting carelessly around his head, and his robes catching on the thorns of the bushes he had just vacated (much to his great annoyance). 

“Drat it all,” he said, stomping one of his wooly moccasins with enormous impatience. “What on the good earth does she want now? I’ve only just finished playing postman between Gandalf and Manwë, and I rather think I deserve a spot of tea and a few years of rest before I’m to be bothered again.” 

Bilbo, as always, found that the presence of a wizard had visited upon him a complete failure in all his considerable social skills, and he wasn’t quite sure what to say. 

“I, uh…” he began a bit stupidly, “that is, I don’t quite know. She appeared to me in a dream, or perhaps an unconsciousness is the more accurate descriptor. And she was not very clear with what it was she wanted. Or perhaps she was exceedingly clear, and it is my understanding which was opaque. In either case, I believe I woke up before we’d really gotten to the heart of it, and…” 

He trailed off then, for he had run out of things to say almost as soon as he’d started talking, though he’d be damned if that had ever stopped him. Luckily, however, this only seemed to validate his plea to Radagast, whose expression was at its own pace turning from one of interesting confusion to one of confused interest. 

“You say she visited you in a dream, my boy?” He said, approaching Bilbo slowly and examining him unabashedly all up and down in very much the same way that Nancy Bracegirdle – one of the Shire’s most shrewd and renowned antiques experts – might have inspected a rather impressive rocking chair. 

And then, as if from nowhere, he summoned a staff which surely hadn’t been in his hand a moment ago, and conked Bilbo firmly over the head with it. 

“Ouch!” shrieked Bilbo, reaching out to swat the wizard on the shoulder with indignance before thoroughly considering what a dangerous decision that certainly was. 

Luckily, Radagast appeared to be neither annoyed by Bilbo’s actions nor remorseful for his own, and he simply gave Bilbo another considering glance before lifting his hat to allow the moth which still flitted by his ear to retreat into the safety of his ratty and snarled hair. 

“Had to check,” he said, as if that justified it. “This would all be much easier if we could simply get you unconscious enough to finish your conversation. But that seems unlikely, and this is no place for any such chatter – for the trees have ears, you know, and they’re terrible gossips. Come with me.” 

And without even checking to make sure that Bilbo followed him, Radagast delved deeper into the forest, following a path none but he knew. With little choice in the matter, and still rubbing the crown of his aching head, Bilbo carried on after him. 

They spent what was either moments or months delving through endless grasping branches, and slipping between the thinnest of divides amongst ancient trees, until at last Bilbo found himself gazing upon what was both the coziest and most decrepit of homes he had in either of his lives ever experienced. It appeared as if an enormous tree had sprouted right in the center of it – and not only had it been permitted to stay, but in its unfurling growth as it reached for the barest hints of sunlight which passed through the leaves it had warped and twisted every component of the house just slightly to the right. Moss and ivy grew in and out of shutters which seemed to have been left open for that very purpose, and what few cobblestones had been laid out diverted distractedly from the door and instead seemed to lead to the entrance of a den belonging to a rather fat and grumpy porcupine. 

“Well, come in, come in,” said Radagast impatiently, throwing open a door which had warped so harshly to one side that Bilbo refused to believe it had not been built at an angle. 

Upon his tentative entrance, Bilbo was not at all surprised to find that, much like the wizard himself, Radagast’s home was full to the brim with nonsense. Spell books and cauldrons – and all of the other magical periphery which one might expect upon entering the dwelling place of the arcane – were littered about as carelessly as you please, and shafts of daylight shot down from holes in the thatched ceiling to light upon old dusty quilts and the many various animals which snuggled amongst them. 

“Sit down then,” the little wizard demanded, as if it were Bilbo who had been the rude one in not presuming his welcome rather than he for not being more inviting. 

But Bilbo knew well enough that to protest would do little good, and so he simply obeyed. 

“Black tea, half a dash of sugar, plenty of cream,” Radagast continued, and once again he was not asking. Somehow, though, he had gotten Bilbo’s very particular preference exactly spot on, and as the hobbit took a careful sip he was also delighted to find that the leaves did not appear to be burned in the least. Perhaps some wizards knew how to prepare a proper cup after all. 

“Right, right,” his host said with a tone of finality, plopping himself down upon a rickety chair opposite him. “Now then, what in the green hills do you think Yavanna wanted to talk with you for?” 

“Half a second,” Bilbo said, a bit offended at the disbelief regardless of how preposterous the situation had also seemed to him. “She is my creator, after all, so it makes perfect sense she’d take some sort of interest.” 

“Your creator…” said Radagast, “I thought your lot were made by Eru himself.” As always, it was not a question, although he did at least seem the slightest bit curious about the potential truth of his own statement. 

Bilbo snorted into his cup. “Oh please, don’t be ridiculous. As my mother used to say: ‘you take one look at a hobbit and try to tell me any man was smart enough to come up with that.’”

Radagast nodded, as if this all made perfect sense to him, and he inquired no further about it. 

In fact, he inquired no further about anything, and after a few minutes of excruciatingly quiet sipping Bilbo finally took it upon himself to continue their conversation. 

“I feel as if I’ve been cursed,” he admitted. This was hardly the usual sort of thing he’d be bringing up in the initial overtures of a first teatime, but Radagast seemed to make everything around him odd – including Bilbo. And regardless, he felt it was highly unlikely he’d be extending an invitation for the wizard to visit his own home next, so it hardly mattered. 

“Cursed?” Radagast mused between rather rude slurps. “Well perhaps you are, my boy! A curse is just a prayer made by someone else, you know.” 

Bilbo glared at him, not at all impressed by his soliloquizing. “You must realize that’s no help at all.” 

“Not to you, at least,” Radagast provided pleasantly, and as he stirred his drink with a little wooden spoon Bilbo saw that it was refilling itself all on its own with a cheerfully steaming water that seemed to come from nowhere at all. 

Dratted wizards. 

There was nothing for it, he felt. If Bilbo was to get anything at all out of the aggravating little sorcerer, he was going to have to give him everything. 

“To be perfectly honest with you, Master Wizard,” he said, not quite knowing where to start a story that had begun in the middle of itself. “…It’s just that I’ve had a rather odd few months, you see… A very long time ago, I was hired to follow a rather rambunctious group of dwarrow on a madcap quest to reclaim their homeland. They were moderately successful, though they suffered great losses, and… Well, regardless, I eventually went home and lived a good long life – partially amongst the elves, including Lord Elrond, whom I consider a friend.” He paused then, to see if his blatant name-dropping had even the slightest sway on the batty old conjurer, but Radagast merely hummed indulgently as if to indicate that he ought to continue before his silence became impolite. 

“Anyway,” Bilbo went on with a sigh, “after I’d put almost a century between that little adventure and myself, I passed on, heading to what I assumed would be the life after this one… Only I didn’t, I just ended up back here, at the start of my journey, and with all my knowledge of what is to come. There are a great many terrible things which are yet to pass, and I can see all of them approaching with a dreadful certainty. But I don’t quite know what to do about it.” 

He hadn’t quite meant to reveal his personal thoughts on the subject, vague though they had been. But he also had not realized the extent to which the burden of his solitary knowledge had weighed on his rather narrow and unimpressive shoulders, and he found that even to share it with the oddest of his acquaintances was some small relief. 

Radagast, for his part, sat with a new gleam in his eyes for the merest of moments, before leaping from his seat to scramble around amongst the various thaumaturgic detritus that was scattered so haphazardly throughout his home. And for a moment, Bilbo’s heart leapt with him, for it seemed the wizard may have in mind some sort of grand answer to all his worries. But after a brief period of digging and grumbling, the fellow only returned with the same kind of long and wonderful wizard’s pipe which Bilbo recognized so well, and he at once began to puff away at it with no small amount of dedication whilst he sat once more and considered everything he had been told. 

Bilbo had long since finished his tea, and was considering the relative rudeness of interrupting his host’s ruminations to ask for a spot more, when at last Radagast spoke: 

“You said you died. Are you sure about that?” 

“Quite sure,” Bilbo responded, “it’s not the sort of thing you can mistake.” 

“True, true…” muttered the wizard, and he chewed on the end of his pipe ponderously as if he were familiar with the feeling. “And are you quite sure that you were meant to die just then? Only it’s very unlike a hobbit to miss an appointment.” 

“I’m certain I have no idea,” Bilbo replied blandly, for he of course did not, and further did not expect himself to. 

Radagast hummed in response, before thinking a moment more. 

“And are you alive, then?” he asked finally. 

“Well I’m not dead, am I!” exclaimed Bilbo, who was beginning to become annoyed. 

“What on the good earth does that have to do with it?” demanded the little wizard, who seemed equally irked. “Ridiculous halflings, don’t know what the Green Lady was thinking,” he continued to mutter around the stem between his teeth. 

The two of them stewed in their silence for a moment, before at last Radagast seemed to come to some sort of a conclusion, which left Bilbo to wait impatiently as the old fellow tapped out his ashen pipeweed onto the floor with a very clear intention not to bother and sweep it up. 

“It seems to me,” he said, at length, “that you have been given this chance for a reason. And it equally seems to me that I have not been told about it, which surely cannot be an accident. You have been traveling with Gandalf, I suspect. Does he know?” 

“He does not,” admitted Bilbo, “I have not told him.” 

“That hardly tends to make a difference, with old Olórin,” grumbled Radagast. “Still, in this instance I believe you may be right, for he seems as baffled by our current events as I now choose to be.” 

Bilbo had – to this point – allowed his gaze to wander a tad in his boredom and annoyance, but upon hearing such a statement from his companion his eyes snapped back with great scrutiny. 

“So you will not help me?” he asked, desperation coloring his tone far more than he would have preferred. 

“No no, dear boy, don’t be ridiculous,” Radagast replied. “I will help you, but I’d rather know as little as possible about what is to come. Such things are really more the purview of Saruman and Gandalf, you see... You might consider telling them all of this, by the by.”

“You trust Saruman, then?” asked Bilbo – who of course knew very well that to do so was a mistake, though he was not sure exactly where Radagast’s loyalties had been laid at the end of it all, come to think of it.

“Oh, of course!” said the Brown Wizard, “I am rather indebted to him, you know. My White and Grey brethren seem to enjoy using up all their thinking to plan for the difficult parts of life. Destiny, and birthrights, and whatnot, and so forth... And that leaves me the time to focus on the dirt, and the grass, and all the world’s smallest creatures, and everything else that actually matters.” 

Though it was odd, to be sure, Bilbo found then that he could not help but understand just a little of what it was Radagast meant, and he even envied him a bit. Were it an option, he too would have preferred to focus on the parts of the world that bloomed, and to go on not knowing its darkest secrets, nor what twisted tales were spun in the deepest of its corners where the shadows ran black. But as it was, he had no choice, and instead he chose not to begrudge the wizard for his. 

“I can see the sense in that,” the hobbit replied, and with a small amount of delight he noted that to hear him say so seemed to confuse his host a bit. “Well then,” he continued, “if you are to help me, you’ll be glad to know I need little more than a lift, at the moment.” 

Radagast sipped at his tea, which was once more full, and hummed in the ambiguous and unilluminating way he seemed to be so fond of. 

“Normally I would protest at my fine Rhosgobel rabbits being treated as pack mules, I’ll have you know,” he said. “But given all that I suspect I would rather not know about what is happening here, I rather think we do not have the time to waste. Where is it that you need to go?” 

And it was then that it once more occurred to Bilbo that he was not rightly sure. 

“Well,” he began hesitantly – for a moment picking at a spot of moss that had grown upon the table, before his hand was swatted away as if to say Radagast preferred it stay there.  
“I lost my dwarves after escaping the goblin tunnels in the Misty Mountains,” he continued on after a moment longer, “and when last we reached this point we went on to stay with the shape-shifter Beorn. Do you happen to know him?” 

“Oh, but of course!” cried Radagast, seeming delighted at the mention. 

“Are you…” started Bilbo, “you wouldn’t happen to be friends with him, would you?” 

This was not a question that was strictly relevant to the situation at hand, but he was so baffled by the thought of either of them keeping regular company with anyone, much less each other, that he felt he simply must know. 

“Well now, let me think…” said Radagast, and he seemed to genuinely be considering the inquiry with greater ponderance than any of the vastly more important subjects they had yet discussed. 

“We have met more than once,” the old conjurer said at long last, “and occasionally even on purpose… And he has not yet eaten me in spite of this… So I think to say we are the best of friends may perhaps be more accurate.” 

One might have thought that the experiences of a rather difficult and unnecessarily extended lifetime would have rid Bilbo of the sensation of shock altogether, but he certainly felt it again at hearing such odd news. 

“Well…” he responded, quite baffled, “I suppose that makes sense. You’re oddly suited for each other.” 

“Why thank you,” said Radagast cheerfully, who apparently found nothing to be offended by in the statement, and only seemed relieved they had at last lighted upon a subject that truly struck his interest. “However, I must warn you that I believe your company left his home some time ago. The trees have ears, as I told you before, and occasionally they choose to let me in on their whisperings when they happen upon something particularly delicious. As I have been told, a band of dwarrow passed into the woods some days ago… or perhaps it was hours. In either case, you’ll be very hard-pressed to find them now, for even I cannot so easily track what appear to be the simplest of trails in this forest, which is why I’ve made my own.” 

Bilbo was dismayed in no small measure at hearing such news, for the idea that his dwarves were to face the terrors of Mirkwood without any knowledge of what lay before him was a terrible one indeed. 

But the one he had next was perhaps far worse. 

“We may not know where they are now,” he said, “but if they manage to make it past the spiders that have infested these parts, I have a good idea where they’re likely to end up.” 

***** 

It was not until the final day that the dwarves spent with Beorn when Thorin at last found his courage. 

It had abandoned him previously, falling from its rightful place somewhere deep within him as if it were instead tucked into the little waistcoat pocket of the one he loved, only to be similarly lost amongst bones and dust below. And though Thorin had, of course, fought Azog just as he had the first time – and with twice the fierceness – that was not courage. Battle was not a matter of bravery, but of conviction. 

No, courage was what he asked of himself as he abandoned the quiet company of Dwalin for the morning, and retreated into the forest which bordered the stone cottage they would cease to occupy soon enough. 

And courage was what let him search, crouched there on his knees, for what was surely an hour or more. He dug through the soft earth, and sifted through summer’s greenest grass, not entirely certain of just what it was that made his quarry right, but always sure when what he’d found was wrong. 

Then, at last, he happened on something he thought would suit. 

Still kneeling, and with a slightly trembling hand, he picked up a little acorn – perfect as any other he had yet found, but somehow still more so – from where it had been tucked between the deep roots of an ancient oak, and held it tight in his fist. 

And still he did not cry. 

It was not for a lack of wanting to – nor certainly for a lack of needing to. The love he felt for Bilbo had been a roiling ocean between them, one that ceaselessly churned up fresh black waves to batter the shores of their distant souls. And if it was to be said that the whole of him was an island, then surely his feeble heart was no more than a teacup, for it often felt as if that same sea of love overwhelmed and overflowed from it, and poured endlessly outward into the world in a way he could not possibly hope to contain. Still, it mattered not, for the distant sight of the far-off shoreline he had once longed to escape into had now been banished from him forever, and he was left to drift the tempestuous currents in forsaken solitude.

All this to say he very much would have liked to have cried, if only for the hope that it might release some small amount of the pressure in his chest which seemed to eternally threaten his resilience with the slightest wind of further grief. But he had long ago lost far too many of those for whom he had cared, and a small part of him feared he may now be incapable of bestowing his tears upon the one who deserved them most. Before Bilbo, though, it had been Frerin, and before that his mother, and his grandfather along with her… and though the Thorin that had once stood here long ago had fiercely believed that his father had not perished and was yet only lost, he could no longer permit himself to hold on to the same idle reassurances. He had loved all of them, quite fiercely, and each in their own way. And though such love now only brought him pain, he found he could not bring himself to regret it. 

He was very much like a traveler in love, he thought. One who partook in the most beautiful splendors available to the world, but was never permitted to stay. And, in truth, he knew that he ought to have known better than to have hoped for anything more in this instance when his love had been at its fiercest and most fragile, but somehow he could not entirely bring himself to regret that either. 

For hope itself was a curse that would follow like a lapdog at his left heel, even as grief and regret followed dutifully at his right. In an endless world full of faces, there would be one he ever sought in a crowded room. Though a king may receive a thousand smiles, he would always hope once more to see that single grin which had only ever been the warming one. And Thorin knew that ever after a small part of himself would be watching every door, and waiting for his hobbit to walk through. 

He loosened his iron grip upon the acorn – which had held up admirably against his graceless indelicacy, just like the one it honored – and with a note of regret with which he was all too familiar he brought the little oaknut to his lips, and pressed upon it a small and reverent kiss, before tucking it into his pocket where it rattled against the woodcarving Bofur had gifted him earlier. 

Thorin smiled at the memory of it. For that, at least, had been a moment of comfort which had stabbed well enough through the fog of his grief – and perhaps it had been that very token which had granted him the courage to find the acorn he would plant for his lost love, though he had known well enough just how deeply he would regret it if he did not. 

“I know it’s hardly much,” Bofur had said earlier that morning, with a look of grim determination about him that did not suit the hour. “But I thought, perhaps… ye might consider it an apology o’ sorts?”

And there he held aloft a small carving of a badger, excellently detailed and wonderfully expressive, offering it for Thorin to take. 

“It was Bilbo’s,” Bofur explained, “for a brief moment, anyway. I like to carve little animals for my friends, y’see. Things that remind me of them. And o’ course he was shocked as anything when I gave it to him, insisted that a rabbit would be more fitting. But he was a badger if I ever saw one. Little and feisty and fearless… Anyhow, it dropped right out o’ his pocket on the bridge, and in the fighting that followed it almost got kicked off the edge, but I managed to save it. Figured it might… Well, it belongs with you now.” 

Manners and niceties would dictate that Thorin at least attempt to insist that Bofur keep it – for he and the burglar had been good friends after all, and it seemed hardly fair that something so special between them should be granted to another. But he found, in his selfishness, that he could not bring himself to do it, and luckily this had only seemed to please Bofur, who clasped his arm with brief reassurance as he handed the little carven toy to his king. 

“Thank you, Master Bofur,” said Thorin with great solemnity. “I will treasure it, truly.” 

“I know ye will,” his old friend replied, with a voice much quieter than accompanied his usual bravado. “I did not think… That is to say, I didn’t know just what it was that… Well, anyway, just call me Bofur, if it please your majesty. I was wrong to say ye had no claim over Bilbo’s name, and now you surely deserve mine.” 

“Thank you, Bofur,” the king had said, cradling the carving delicately in his hands as if it were as fragile as blown glass. “But you must call me Thorin, as well.” 

The miner had looked a bit shocked at such an allowance, and in truth it had shocked Thorin a bit to provide it. But he did not feel in the least mistaken for doing so. Though he had been closer with many of his company by this time previous, to the very end there had been some who still had not called him by his name, for at the time he had felt he was a king above all other things, and a friend only second. 

Now, though, he found that he did not carry with him the same desperate desire to hoard the respect of others, as if it were the last treasure he was yet allowed in his exile. To rule was not something done in title, but in deed, he had come to realize, and the respect of those from whom respect meant anything at all was only ever similarly allotted. 

It seemed, however, that he had quite luckily gained some of Bofur’s in doing so – for the dwarf held his fist to his heart and bowed in the traditional manner which had little place outside of a throne room, though to Thorin it felt as high an honor as he could have hoped to have been accorded. And so he had returned the gesture, there in the front hall of that large and lonely cottage where they had made their camp, and it had seemed as if the forgiveness of his friends was granted right alongside it. For when once more he raised his head, he saw that many of them watched from afar with looks of approval. 

With only those two moments of brief and sacred respite, the rest of the day passed him by in a long and continuous blur. The dwarves began to pack their meager belongings, and Balin was sent to beg off as many provisions as could be acquired from their inhospitable host, while Thorin took upon himself the arduous task of speaking with their wizard. 

“I simply do not understand what has possessed you, Master Oakenshield,” the old codger had spluttered upon hearing Thorin’s proposal. “We have been granted secret knowledge of a hidden highway through the forest, known only to Beorn and a few others. And yet you would prefer to traipse your company right down the Old Road, where orcs are known to travel and elven eyes are sure to follow! It defies belief.” 

Thorin, who once would have matched such dramatism with his own, merely nodded to indicate that his feelings on the matter were not changed. 

“Even so,” he said, “such secret passages would only open us up to attackers we do not yet anticipate. That forest is under some dark spell, the likes of which I have not seen and do not understand. And until such time as the accursed elvenking sees fit to reign properly over his own kingdom, there will yet be many creatures that wait and watch for us in the dark. I do not know the ways of wizards, but I would prefer to fight an army of orcs which we see coming over any enchantment that we do not.”

Gandalf gave him a look of great scrutiny, as if such reasonable logic was beyond his comprehension. 

“What is it you know, my young king?” he asked shrewdly – though Thorin, it must be noted, was by dwarven standards not young at all, and in fact to anyone but Istari or elf he would have been assumed to have a good deal of wisdom in his age. 

“Nothing which concerns you, especially as you insist on abandoning us in this most treacherous stage of our quest,” he only replied coolly, rather than saying so. 

“Well, Thorin Oakenshield, what it is I must do is similarly no concern of yours, though you would not be spared the repercussions should I stay,” replied Gandalf in a considerable huff. “Your journey is but one small piece of a very large puzzle, Master Dwarf, and I cannot help but feel that the loss of our burglar has corrupted its purpose entirely. Still, I will see you to the end of it, as I have promised. If you truly insist on taking the Old Forest Road, you will find yourself further south from Erebor than you would if you simply listened to my advice, but as long as you make good time you should find your way to the Lonely Mountain before Durin’s Day is upon you, and there you will find me waiting.” He paused then, once more examining the king with a calculating eye. “You must not enter the mountain without me, do you understand?” 

Thorin nodded, for he understood such words well enough, though of course he as ever had no intention of following the orders of meddling old fools. 

And it had been with no more fuss than that with which they had by midday found themselves entirely wizardless, and having traversed well into the familiar and unfriendly forest Thorin remembered all too well. The Old Forest Road – which had once been made by the dwarrow themselves, to allow Erebor and the Iron Hills ease of access to the Blue Mountains – was now as unkempt and uncared-for as their previous passage had been. Indeed, the only true difference to his eyes was that their trail, though still easily lost, was wide enough that they might walk two or three at a time rather than one after another. This hardly mattered, though, as it was difficult to have anything approaching a conversation while the sensation that they were being watched followed behind them like an uninvited addition to their party. 

The animals, however, appeared to prefer this path, and though the dwarves had been warned never to venture from what little of the trail they could make out – for fear of becoming lost forever – a number of wild turkeys and leaping jackrabbits seemed to have made a game of popping temptingly in and out of sight between what few gaps there were in the trees only just beyond their reach. 

They continued on like this for a good many days, though it was hard to ascertain any certain quantity. And the further they ventured into the depths of wooded darkness which began to encroach closer and closer upon them, the more often they found themselves spending hours upon hours without the slightest glimpse of the sun. The trees on every side had begun to knot their uppermost branches together in untraceable patterns, as if to take comfort in the concept of any shared safety they might have in numbers, and the effect of it blocked the light and wind from them. The ensuing sensation of such dim and unshifting air was one of such great effect that many members of the company had begun to run their hands along the bark of any tree that came close enough to reach, just to make absolutely sure they were in fact there at all, and not adrift in the untouchable ether of some unknown madness. 

They encountered few orcs and goblins in their long and arduous trek, and what few of the small southward-heading troupes they happened upon were dispatched viciously and with great prejudice. And before long they had begun – as once they had before – to count the passage of time not by the setting of the unreachable sun, but by the dwindling nature of their rations. 

It was, of course, on the day of three-quarters-gone that an enormous bull elk ventured across their path. 

“Look!” Nori whispered emphatically, as if none of the rest of them might have noticed the most interesting thing to have happened to them in however many meals made a week. 

“Aye,” Bombur muttered, and Thorin could see on his face the promise of many delicious meals to come – for an animal of that size could provide over a hundred pounds of meat, which could be salted and loaded into their now all-too-light packs. And even for the dwarrow, who considered no food a meal lest meat were at the center of it, an elk such as that one could last their entire party for much more than a month. 

Don’t shoot!” Thorin called with great urgency to the lot of them, realizing at once what they must be planning. But before he could get the words out properly, he heard the soft whiz of an arrow being released from its tensile trapping, and Kili’s head whipped over to look at him with guilt on his face. 

Luckily, the king’s warning had at least caused his nephew’s usually considerable accuracy to entirely miss its mark, and rather than piercing the elk’s lungs as he had intended Kili only managed to lose an arrow as it ricocheted and splintered off an enormous rock just beyond the animal. 

“You fools,” Thorin reprimanded sternly, “you ought to give more regard to the warnings of wizards. For all that he may talk himself in circles, there is a reason that Tharkûn cautioned us against hunting in this forest. The entirety of it is cursed, surely this has not escaped you.” 

Kili bowed his head in embarrassment, but Thorin paid him no mind, instead only watching the elk which stood no more than twenty meters from them with a great sense of foreboding. 

It had not run off at being so assaulted, nor had it moved to charge them as had the white stag they once encountered on the journey previous. Instead it shook its shaggy mane of fur in what appeared to be the mildest kind of annoyance, and spared them hardly a glance before throwing its forked antlers – still felted with the growth of summer, and wide as an eagle’s wings – backward. In the same swift motion it released a piercing call toward the sky, and its breath caught in a chill which none of them had even noticed, becoming a crystal cloud that drifted and disappeared into the darkness of the trees beyond. 

And at hearing the bugled warning, several more unseen elk responded from places which were hidden from them, the sound of their unearthly bellows echoing off of the trees and through the din so directionlessly that the dwarves knew they were quite surrounded, but could not possibly hope to pinpoint exactly where. 

Then, with hardly a parting glance, the animal snorted twice, and walked from their path with deliberate and almost antagonistic slowness, traipsing once more into the secret safety of the forest. 

“I’m sorry, uncle,” Kili said, his gaze still upon the ground beneath them. 

Thorin took pity on him, for he was still young after all, and was only as hungry as the rest of them. 

“You are forgiven,” he said, patting his nephew lightly on the shoulder with what he hoped was clear reassurance. “I will admit, the taste of wild meat tempts me too, and it seems no harm has come from your actions. Still, you would do well to fear this forest, all of you, for there are a great many tricks hidden in its depths that it has yet not begun to play.” 

And with solemn nods and grim expressions, his company continued their trek. 

But that moment was a turning point, he would later realize. For it was one thing to be slowly starving with no option to the alternative, but to have fully faced the idea that food was within your grasp, and that it was simply unwise to pursue it… that was much tougher a vein to mine. 

Their troubles began in full when they stopped for a rather disappointing dinner at the base of an enormous and angrily-gnarled oak. They had lit a fire as they crouched amongst its grasping roots – though they knew that to do so only attracted moths, which danced alongside the floating embers which escaped the flames below and rose to light the darkness above for the merest of moments before their extinguishment, in what was no more than an empty imitation of the unseeable stars. 

And so it was that with half-full stomachs, and lacking entirely the heart for any stories or song, the group of them sat quietly for a good long while, with only the crackling warmth of the fire to fill the empty spaces between them. 

It was once again Nori, who noticed it first. 

“Do you see that?” he whispered to Dori – who at the time was fussing with his overcoat, attempting to remove the many burrs that had attached themselves to it during the day. 

“See what?” asked Dori absentmindedly, not yet bothering to look up. 

“There, in the distance…” Nori elbowed his older brother urgently, “surely you see it. Just there…” 

Dori raised his head with the sort of put-upon sigh which only oldest siblings can manage, and let his gaze follow in the direction where Nori was emphatically pointing. 

And sure enough, the old dwarrow saw something or another there. 

“It’s the elves!” whispered Nori with excitement. “Look, what a wonderful party they’re having, and so close to us too… I think they’ve roasted an elk, perhaps even the same one we missed earlier.” 

Dori gave his younger brother an unimpressed glance, but this did little but further provoke the dwarf. 

“Come now,” Nori said, “Look closer then, look closer. Surely you see it. There’s so very much meat there, all dripping and juicy, and those leaf-eaters couldn’t possibly hope to finish it. Their company leaves something to be desired, of course, but to waste such excellent food…” 

Dori squinted in the direction his brother was pointing once more, and for a moment he seemed utterly confused, until with a great jolt he jumped to his feet. 

“Oh dear!” he cried. “Little Ori has wandered into their festivities, the young fool. He’ll be taken away, I just know it!” 

With a cry of alarm Nori too leapt to his feet, for he now saw his brother in grave danger as well, and with hardly a glance around them the two dashed into the dark and dismal forest. 

This confused the rest of the dwarves, and Ori most of all, who as it happened was sitting just next to Dwalin (and therefore very near to Thorin). But before they could be stopped, the pair of overprotective older brothers had run off, and were quickly lost to the darkness. 

“Goodness me,” said Ori, looking rather worried. “Should I… I ought to go and fetch them, right?” 

Dwalin grunted, and gave the dwarf an unimpressed sort of glance. 

“No use you getting yourself into trouble,” he said. “I had better do it, and Thorin along with me. There’s no knowing what awaits us in the dark.” 

He was, Thorin thought, more correct than he knew. 

With a sigh of defeat, the king rose from the somewhat-comfortable position he had managed to discover after a good deal of effort put into the matter, and he looked around at the remaining members of his company. They, too, were looking with great interest in the direction which the oldest brothers Ri had just disappeared into – some of them with expressions of deep confusion, and others with that same interested curiosity. Though Thorin, when he glanced over, saw nothing but shadows upon shadows, and blackened depths beyond imagining. Still, he knew better than to expect his friends to act sensibly without first being told to. 

“None of you are to venture into the forest, until we have returned,” he said. “We will only be a short while, and you must wait for us here no matter what odd ideas you might find in your heads. We shan’t venture far enough to lose the light of the campfire, so you must ensure that it still burns to guide us.” 

And with a nod to Dwalin, he stepped beyond the safety of the path, and into the beckoning treeline. They did not go very far at all, but soon enough the glow which their fire had washed over the trees closest to them was gone from them, and in turning back he found that he could not see anything of it at all. 

Surely he had only managed to put an inconvenient bush or two in his line of sight, he thought. They had hardly been walking more than a minute or so, and that was not nearly long enough to have gotten themselves lost. (For Thorin did not get lost, after all, no matter what teasing remarks his sister and her sons liked to make. It was just that sometimes the places he was looking for were not at all where he expected to find them. This happened to everybody, occasionally, usually with items like small knives and handkerchiefs and left boots, and it hardly made a difference that for Thorin the item was occasionally himself. Were you to ask him, he would say it was as much the fault of the place which had misplaced itself as it was his for not being able to find it, but of course he would rather you did not ask him at all.)

Despite this, there was a small voice in his head which argued that he knew very well what this forest was capable of, but far more powerful words of comfort and complacency had seemed to drift into his mind and had settled down to stay, and he did not question the logic of them nearly as much as he should. 

It had only just occurred to him that calling for Nori and Dori might be a reasonable approach to their search, and he meant to tell Dwalin as much, when he noticed that the warrior had gone stock still and was squinting into the distance. 

“Thorin,” he grunted, “do you see…”

And suddenly he gave a great cry of outrage, and swiftly drew his axes. 

“The others!” he shouted. “It was a trap, they are under attack!” 

And he ran off into the woods, sure that Thorin would follow. 

Which he meant to do, as he always would. Only he was fairly certain that was not at all the direction they had come from, and there was a rather pleasant glow visible from the corner of his left eye that he rather wanted a look at. 

It was a good thing he did, too, for when he gathered his senses well enough to turn himself and investigate, he found the loveliest of sights before him. There, in a small clearing that was oh so close to him, the grandest of parties was being held. Torches were lit, fires were crackling, and little lanterns were hung from the trees. Great candles, too, were placed among the foliage, and were dripping colorful wax down the enormous trunks while their flames flitted and twinkled merrily. The smell of roast meat wafted over to him on a breeze he still could not feel, and he found that it was dwarven spices they had seasoned it with. Quite flavorsome stuff, and strong too, not at all like the usual fare of the fair elves. 

For there were elves, of course – they were not to be avoided in a place such as this. But Thorin had begun to feel that Nori had perhaps been right, in this instance, and what this feast may have lacked in good company it could surely make up for with such excellent food and spirits (which there were plenty of too, great barrels of wine stacked high upon each other, pouring delicious and dark and endless into goblets of silver and gold). 

The elves themselves danced sat in large circles and chatted amongst each other with excitement, while others danced cheerfully, or played delicate tunes upon beautifully-carved instruments, or stood aside and generally made merry as they partook of every possible food Thorin could imagine. 

He approached slowly and cautiously, his mind not yet made up about the relative worth of his plan to slip in silently to steal away some food, and it was then that he caught a clearer glimpse of the cluster of dancers in the center of it all. 

They were performing some rather complicated choreography which required a good deal of hand waving and bowing, but this of course did not interest Thorin in the least. No, what caught his eye and caused Orcrist to slip from his unfeeling fingers was the little creature that hopped around gaily in the middle of it all, kicking his little legs and prancing about on furry feet with little thought to the synchronicity of his fellow performers. 

It was Bilbo. 

The little hobbit had his eyes closed, and was gamboling to and fro with a rhythm of his own design. And though Thorin’s gasp was choked silent in his parched throat, he yet had strength in him to run. 

So run he did. As fast as he could, over fallen trees and across treacherous roots whose attempts to trip him up he could not even see for how dark and gloomy the forest around him was. But when at last he reached the outskirts of their festivities, every elven light amongst them was extinguished, and he was banished once more to blackness. 

“Bilbo!” he cried out desperately. “Bilbo, where are you!” 

But he received no reply. 

“Bilbo!” he called once more, as much for the chance to have a reason to say the name at all as for any hope that he might gain an answer. “Bilbo!” 

And still there was nothing. 

Just when he was about to give up his blind fumbling, and sit himself upon a nearby log to wait for a dawn he knew would never reach him, there was yet again another flicker of light from the farthest reaches of his vision. 

The small voice in his head, which was only growing smaller, insisted that this made no sense at all. That Bilbo was dead, and the party of elves would not simply have relocated a mere hundred meters away at his approach. But hope was ever Thorin’s companion, even now, and he merely gathered his senses and pressed forward into the forest. 

On and on this continued, over and over, until the blackness around him had only become a dull and unfriendly grey, and he knew the sun must have risen somewhere far away. 

And still, the light sprang forth. 

His nose was now blind to the scent of meat, and his chapped lips hardly ached for wine and water. But there Bilbo still danced, and it seemed – this time, unlike any previous – as if he could see Thorin, for his face was certainly now turned in his direction, and his eyes were open. 

“Bilbo!” the king called out once more, and he dragged himself painfully forward, until at last he broke through the clearing. 

The lights dimmed, of course, but in the faint glow of morning he was no longer blind. And it was for this reason that the last thing he saw – before a large canvas bag was thrust over his head, and he saw nothing more at all – was the abandoned encampment where his friends had once sat, and the remains of a campfire that had long since grown cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As with a lot of things, Tolkien had various ideas about where exactly Rhosgobel was located, but at the end of his life he had placed it near the carrock, and since that's convenient for me and my love of writing ridiculous wizards I decided to go with that one... Anyway, I forgot to mention it last time, but the previous upload marked a few milestones, including one month of writing and 100 pages on Word, so everyone go pop a bottle for that. Thank you, as always, to everyone who has subscribed and commented and bookmarked and kudos'ed and whatnot. I love getting the emails for it, and I have to admit I hop on here every once in a while to check my stats. I write so rarely that it's exciting to see any amount of people interested in it at all. As always, I hope everyone is safe and well, and if you'd like you can come say hi to me on my Tumblr of the same username


	12. Chapter 12

Many people – most of them poets, and all of them fools – have at some point or another attempted to capture the essence of Thranduil, son of Oropher, Elvenking of the Woodland Realm. Often enough they would describe his eyes as starlight, and his hair as threaded gold, which would inevitably lead them to wax on about how he was – in fact – very old (obligated as they were by the obvious rhyme), and so on and so forth would their descriptions become increasingly vapid and inane until only the king himself could find any entertainment in listening much further. Elves, it is well known, can live for twice as long as you could ever imagine, and then another decade on top of that – and one would think that the passage of time would thus be so obscured from them that they might go years without noticing it at all. As it was, however, this seemed not to apply to performances of poetry – and especially not the poetry of men – for Prince Legolas in particular had once famously cut off a visiting diplomat’s attempt to draft a limerick for his father before the fellow had even gotten so far as to say: “There once was an elf with great luck-”

The problem, of course, was not with balladry itself (which elves happen to be more than a little fond of, nearly to the point of excess). Rather, it was that in their efforts to understand and describe the elvenking’s visage the author would invariably attempt to compare it to something else. And as beautiful as it may be to say that his skin shone like the silver of moonlight upon the purest of lakes, and that his regal brow cleft his fair face like a clap of thunder through the loveliest of dreams, it was really not worth saying such things at all given that they were hardly accurate. In this world there are a very small number of things which are nothing at all like the rest, and Thranduil in his entirety was very much one of them. Regrettably, this meant that the only possible way to properly compose an epic in his honor would be to say that he had the regal bearing of himself, and a crown that only he wore, and a rare smile which would light a room as if it were the smile of the Elvenking of the Greenwood in a darkened place – which made for poor verse, and all but eliminated the potential for a satisfying rhyme. 

Regardless, though many people in his six-thousand years had drafted an innumerable multitude of sonnets and verses and haikus and cinquains for him, and had used every pentameter known to every race in doing so (some even going to far as to invent their own), none of them at all had ever claimed him to be patient. And though there were many more general ballads amongst nearly all the people of Middle Earth which waxed upon the common theme of the Quality of Mercy, Thranduil had not heard them, or if he had he did not listen. 

It was for this reason that he was, on this day, to be found quite ardently embittered. This was not an altogether rare occurrence, to be sure, but he nonetheless managed to infuse his rancor with a fresh-faced fury rarely seen in people who have lived half so long as he (and have therefore begun to run out of things to be angry at). It was rather impressive, and the walls likely would have shook with it if elven craftsmanship weren’t quite what it was. 

“Why is it that the dwarrow ever insist on astounding me with their insolence?” he demanded in a great huff, the train of his silver-stitched gown trailing behind him upon the cool stone beneath it (and yet picking up no dust, in that way which only elves can manage, and all others must merely envy). 

His guards said nothing, for they were tasked with doing so, and instead moved gracefully aside to allow him an easy retreat into his overly-extravagant rooms. 

Opulence is a word used far too often, and the commonality therein has thus robbed you and I of any accurate way to describe the uniquely fanciful décor of the king’s quarters. Instead, it must simply be said that every reasonable surface of his chambers was bejeweled with great gems of white and silver, and every unreasonable surface was plated with gold. The effect was one of a suite filled with starlight, though with none of the surrounding context of the darkened sky which lends them the beauty of persistent and far-off hope. Instead it felt rather sterile, and clean, and this was exactly how the Elvenking preferred it. They too did not answer as he continued in his rage, remaining only a twinkling and passive audience to his seething soliloquy. 

“They enter brazenly into my kingdom,” he continued on to himself, as the doors were closed discretely behind him, and he poured a rather considerable amount of wine into an intricately-carved chalice of pure silver. “They traipse into my realm as would common criminals, they pursue my people’s feasting with their wretched and clumsy clamor, and they set their sights upon my elk! It is a good thing dwarven aim is deplorable, for if they had done any harm I would swiftly have their heads.” 

Comforted somewhat by the confidence of his own statement, the Elvenking helped himself to his drink, and sat himself upon an enormous and uncomfortable-looking chair with the sort of grace that accompanies being entirely unrushed by the whims of the world. 

He was certainly very cross with the dwarves, and Thorin most of all – though he would not admit to himself that what bothered him most was not merely the disrespect with which they had slunk past his borders unannounced, nor even was it the audacity with which they had attempted to hunt one of his elk (for though their herd was special to the Elvenking they were still wild animals, after all, and the carrying capacity of his forest was not infinite). Rather, what irked him so enormously was the odd behavior of the exiled King Under the Mountain. Thranduil had expected brash antagonism and foolheaded theatrics – and he had gotten them too, if only for a moment. The enraged dwarf had spat and shouted, and had for a long time railed grand proclamations of nonsense about burglars and hostages, until at last the head of the hunting party which had captured him conceded that they had employed a bit of trickery in doing so. This thinly-veiled taunt, however, had rather the opposite of its intended effect, and instead of further infuriating Thorin, it had only silenced him. 

Upon receiving no further cooperation, nor any response at all, Thranduil had banished the little king to a cell as he had done with the rest of his unsavory troupe. But in the interim of the following week, the dwarf had hardly eaten the bread and meat provided to him, nor taken more than a sip or two from his water. Thinking this to be a form of protest, the Thranduil had banished him further and further to the depths of his dungeons, until at last he was restricted to a hold so dank and dark that even torchlight seemed to touch it carefully. And still, this had little further effect on the dwarf in any direction at all. He seemed listless and inert, as if he were a prisoner of his own mind, and any elven efforts to further his incarceration were nothing more to him than an arbitrary change in his location. 

It was all thoroughly aggravating to Thranduil, who had for the last few decades been feeling rather cooped up by the growing darkness of the Greenwood, and would so have enjoyed something to toy with. 

“Foolish dwarves,” he muttered, crossing one elegant leg over the other in an attempt to make his seat even mildly more comfortable. “Curse them all, and their king twice over. May he rot in the deepest of my dungeons for years to come, and ever listen to my laughter.” 

The ostentatious ornamentation of his empty rooms only glimmered back at him, of course, and though the Elvenking was surrounded by a good many elaborate trinkets and beautifully carved furnishings which were yet similarly uncomfortable, there was nothing to be seen among them which might offer an engaged ear to his murmured woes. 

In a corner, however, and tucked well enough away from view, there crouched an invisible little someone who heard mention of a certain dwarf he had been missing, and took a great deal of interest indeed. 

***** 

Bilbo had long since discovered that there were some events in life that were always going to shock you, no matter how well you saw them coming. Death, for example, had been an enormous surprise - for as much as his last days had been spent bedridden and waiting for the bebothered thing to happen already, he had still been the slightest bit affronted when at last it had.

It was with this same sense of over-anticipated dissatisfaction that he stole past the keen eyes of the watchful Silvan guards at the heel of a returning hunting party, and found himself once more a hidden dweller in the home of the wood-elves. 

As glad as he was to be rid of the Mirkwood – with all its unnatural wildry, and its trees which seemed to pull their energy from shadows rather than sun – he was nonetheless very little comforted by his return to the cold and dismal dungeons of the Elvenking. They were beautiful, of course – for all elven things are – but they were also sterile and dark, and the effect was one so unlike the forest after which they were modeled that they seemed almost to make a mockery of it. The Silvans had a great love of all that grew, and Bilbo’s hobbitish nature would once have considered them to be kindred spirits, he was sure. But the mistrustful reservations of their king had forced them further and further into the cavernous corners of the woods they had once freely roamed, and as a result they had become nothing but visitors to their own homeland whenever they dared to briefly venture into it. 

It was for many days that Bilbo found himself sneaking and creeping, waiting and watching, and all the while hoping for some sign amongst the many elves he so carefully avoided that would indicate his luck had held true, and his dwarves had once more been captured. He could have simply camped out in the place he knew well enough would soon become their prison – of course – but to do so was rather boring, and though he had no inclination as to what he could possibly be achieving with his time there he nevertheless hated to feel that he was wasting it. 

And so instead he spent his waking hours exploring the endless depths of the cavernous home of the elves, and never quite getting the hang of any of it. He learned the route to the kitchens best, although he had a very hard time of stealing more than a single small roll of bread here, and a handful of greens there, and by the time the third day had passed him by he had become very hungry indeed. 

He also learned how to find the king’s throne room, of course, for all paths seemed to lead to it. And from there it was not so very hard to follow Thranduil into his chambers, provided he was sneaky about it. Elves have very keen senses, as anyone knows, and even invisibility did little to guarantee him safe passage. But Bilbo was nothing if not cunning, and certainly very brave besides, and so he managed to explore a good deal of their hidden hallways before at last the dwarves were delivered to him. 

The day that it happened, he had spent the morning investigating the very same wine cellars through which they would once more escape, in the hopes that he would find some new and rather clever way to extricate them all without having to wait until the Silvan Feast of Starlight to do so – though none came to him. Thus discouraged, he had eventually left to the kitchens in the hopes of stealing away a bite or two of food, but upon his arrival he found them to be in quite a state, with the many elves who worked there in a certain amount of snittery about something or another. 

“So many prisoners all at once!” huffed the loudest of them – whom, by nature of his vociferousness, Bilbo had always assumed to be the head chef. “And dwarrow too… They’ll bring the whole dungeon down if they don’t get their meat, as if we had much to spare. I don’t know what our king was thinking…” 

He continued on and on with his expostulations – all the while checking on boiling pots and taking large whiffs of whatever was being steamed beside them – and at every one of his moodily-made points, another elf who was following him around nodded emphatically, as if to affirm that he was of course right in everything he had ever said. 

And Bilbo, at hearing such news, forgot his hunger entirely (which was quite something, as you well know). It seemed that at last, after so long a separation, his friends had been returned to him, and he was so excited to be reunited with them once more that he ran more than tiptoed on his way down, down, down, into the elven dungeons. 

It was Balin and Bombur whom he at last happened upon first, and at greeting them Bilbo was as annoyed as he was surprised to hear that they had assumed him to have been so easily killed. He was no dwarrow, to be sure, and was therefore not made of metal and rock – but he was, after all, a dragon-riddler (though he forgot, in his indignation, that of course they could not know this), and an orc-fighter and troll-slayer besides. He forgot his displeasure quickly enough, however, for they were enormously overjoyed to see him, and he was inevitably forced to hush their jubilant cheering and exuberant exclamations as to his wit and cunning for fear that a guard might overhear them. 

It was then that they told him the elves had split them into pairs, after the twelve of their company – with the exception of Thorin, who hadn’t been seen since he wandered away from Dwalin in the woods – had initially been placed in a single cell, only to quite quickly enough bring the iron bars down by bashing and battering upon them as dwarves do so well. Bilbo already knew this, of course, for they had done so last time, though that did not stop him from scolding them lightly for their theatrics. 

“But you must continue on, my friend!” Bombur exclaimed. “You really ought to find the other dwarves, and let them know that you are alive and well. And, oh, Bifur will surely be in quite a state at being locked up so,” he began to fret, “but Bofur will know what to do! Please do help him, if it’s not too much to ask.” 

“Aye,” Balin nodded, “and you must find Thorin as well. I can only hope that he is here, somewhere, and I know he will be very gladdened indeed to see that you are hale and whole.” 

Bilbo privately thought that this was very unlikely indeed, but he promised to do his best to find the rest of their party – and after reassuring Bombur that he would do his utmost to help his family, and that really it was no trouble at all, he departed from them. 

The rest were not so very far away, he soon discovered, and it seemed that luckily enough there was little that was drastically changed about their situation from the time previous. Fili and Óin had been put together in a cramped little cell, and seemed in high enough spirits, all things considered. Óin had insisted on giving Bilbo a good once-over, of course, and had declared him to be healthy and alive, if a bit lean (all of which Bilbo could have told him himself, and in fact did, though the healer hadn’t listened). And Fili was of course delighted to see his favorite little hobbit returned to him, and similarly urged him to find Thorin as quickly as he could. 

Dwalin and Kili were only a few cells further down the darkened hall, and offered him excited greetings in their own unique iterations. Bilbo felt that it was a very good thing that Kili had been locked away with the only person besides his uncle, and perhaps Balin, who could mind him properly. But of course he did not say as much to either of them. 

After that was Ori and Dori (and Bilbo wondered if the old fusspot had bullied the elves into keeping them together). They were also quite glad to see him, and bustled about making sure he was well, and sharing all sorts of stories of their time apart – which Bilbo followed little, and understood even less. It seemed they had indeed gone to meet with Beorn, and Bilbo did his best to seem shocked at the very idea of a man who was also a bear, and who did not eat meat, of all oddities. Afterward, however, they had apparently taken a different road through the forest, and had seem some very strange things indeed. 

But sooner rather than later he was forced to depart from them as well, and it was further down the hall that he at last found Bofur, who was sitting on the floor of his cell and listening patiently – though with a slightly glazed expression – to Glóin’s dismal moans about never again seeing his beautiful wife and stout young son. 

At Bilbo’s sudden appearance, the both of them leapt up and hollered for joy, and threw themselves against the bars of their cells to get a better look at him. 

“But how did you survive the goblin tunnels?” Bofur demanded. “It seemed such a great height to fall, we were certain we had lost you!”

“Truthfully, I don’t know,” Bilbo admitted. “The only thing I can guess is that I did not die because I was not yet meant to.” 

This was an answer more suited for wizards than dwarves, but the both of them accepted it readily enough, and reached through the bars of their cell to pat his shoulders with great affection. 

“Well we’re certainly glad you didn’t, m’lad,” Glóin declared with a fatherly confidence. “And Thorin most of all, I imagine! Have you found him ye- oof!” 

The last part of his sentence was not intentional so much as it was a reaction to Bofur’s rather sharp elbow in his side, and the miner then looked at Bilbo apologetically, as if it were the hobbit whom he had so abruptly injured. 

“Don’t mind him, my friend,” said Bofur, “he’s quite mad. But have you found Thorin, then? Only, we haven’t seen him since we were taken hostage by the weed-eaters.” 

“I have not,” said Bilbo, who was beginning to wonder just what exactly had happened to his company in the bewitched glens of the Mirkwood, for they were all certainly acting very strange. “Though that reminds me, Bombur wished for me to tell you that he is well, and that he is worried about Bifur. Being locked up so abruptly likely won’t agree with him, and he said you might know how I could help.” 

“Aye,” replied Bofur, his expression now darkening. “I warned the elves of as much, but of course they wouldn’t hear it. Low-down bastards, the lot of them. Here…” and at this point he removed the hat from his head, though he looked rather strange without it, and passed it to Bilbo. “Give him this, and tell him Bombur and I are safe as can be, and that you’re looking for a way to get us out of here… You are, aren’t you?”

“Of course!” Bilbo exclaimed. “I’ll have you out of this wretched place as quickly as I can, only it may be a while longer yet.” 

“Quite alright, quite alright,” chimed in Glóin, who had at last regained his breath, “we all have faith in ye, you’ll see us through.” 

Bilbo was rather touched at being bestowed such confidence – and he told the both of them so, before saying his goodbyes and departing to delve further into the murky depths of the dungeon. 

Luckily, it was not so very far away at all that he came upon Bifur, who was crouched in the corner of his cell with his head in his hands, and Nori, who knelt beside him and was whispering comfortingly. 

“Psst!” Bilbo whispered as he took his ring off, all too aware that he had not seen an elven guard in a suspiciously long time, and not at all keen to be caught. 

“Bilbo!” Nori whispered back, and of course it was only he alone amongst all the company who had the sense to celebrate quietly. He rushed to the edge of the cell where he could see his friend better, but Bifur did not move. 

“Yes, I’m alive, I’m alive,” Bilbo reassured, though he was slightly surprised to see the dwarf was not quite as overtly shocked by the revelation as his companions. “But how is Bifur?” 

“Not well at all, I’m afraid,” Nori said, his expression quickly becoming rather angry and troubled. “He does not do well with such unfamiliar and unfriendly places, and of course he worries for his family.” 

“Oh!” exclaimed Bilbo. “I have something that may help that.”

And, of course, he reached for his back pocket where he had folded and tucked Bofur’s great wooly hat, and passed it to Nori. The dwarf accepted it gratefully, and knelt once more next to Bifur, holding it to his chest until he noticed its presence, and then at last handing it over. Nori began to whisper again, and though his words were spoken in Khuzdul and Bilbo could not understand them, he heard the occasional use of one of their names, and Bofur and Bombur’s most often. Eventually, Bilbo too sat down – cross-legged, at the edge of their cell, as close as he could get – and offered his own reassurances about their safety, and promises that he would get them out just as quickly as he could. 

For a long while, Bifur only stroked the soft fur that lined his cousin’s hat in the same slow back and forth pattern, and rocked his head a bit with dismay. But eventually, their efforts calmed him, and Bilbo was very glad to see that at long last he lifted his gaze, and his eyes met Bilbo’s. 

“Bilbo’s back, you see?” Nori said, now speaking in Westron for the hobbit’s benefit. “Couldn’t keep him away from us, I imagine he’s a bit obsessed.” 

Bifur snorted, and said something or another in Khuzdul which made Nori laugh, though when Bilbo demanded to know just exactly how he was being made fun of the dwarves only shook their heads and laughed harder. It was all really very rude, and he thought with a begrudging smile that he really didn’t know why he put up with the lot of them. 

Just then, his stomach growled rather unpleasantly, and he realized suddenly that he’d never stolen the little snack he’d been hoping for. Bifur heard the noise (though it was possible Thranduil himself had heard the faint echoes of it from his lofty halls so far above them, for hobbits are not particularly quiet about any expression of hunger no matter how unintentional). And the dwarf said something in Khuzdul which Bilbo, of course, once more did not understand, though he was certain from the cadence that it was a question. 

“No, it’s very difficult to find food out here, unfortunately,” he responded, making a confident guess as to what his friend had asked. “I steal food from the kitchens every so often, but elves are very tidy and have rather keen eyes, so it’s hard to get away with much.” 

Bifur frowned at him, and Nori did too, before the former stood up and walked forward to meet Bilbo at the edge of their confines. Rather than continue their conversation, however, Bifur only reached through the bars to gently move Bilbo to one side, before covering his ears briefly and then gesturing to him, as if to say he was about to be very loud and the hobbit ought to prepare himself. 

Bilbo hardly had a moment to obey, and wonder just what it was that his friend was about to do, before Bifur shouted something into the din, and the sound of his powerful dwarven roar bounced cleanly off the smooth stone walls of the dungeons and was carried away quite far into the dark. 

For a moment there was not a sound to be heard beyond the distant reverberations of whatever it was he had bellowed. But then, at last, there was joyful cry of response, and though he did not know the language Bilbo could tell quite clearly that it was Bofur and Glóin who spoke it. Soon after, there could be heard the much more muted voices of Dori and Ori, who seemed to be responding to Bofur and Glóin, and on and on and fainter and fainter the chain of ecstatic greetings continued (although Bilbo felt it was very likely the elves would be slightly suspicious, or possibly even afraid, of their behavior, for those who did not know dwarves well would likely misunderstand their tones and presume they spoke in anger). 

Bifur waited for a moment, still turning Bofur’s hat in his hands, before he gestured to Bilbo to cover his ears once more, and shouted out what seemed to be a long and rather complicated sentence. 

This time, upon receiving his message, Bofur and Glóin paused for a moment, before repeating it exactly – or, at least, as far as Bilbo’s untrained ears could tell – to Ori and Dori, who then passed it to Dwalin and Kili, and so on and so forth it continued until at last it reached Balin and Bombur. Bilbo wondered at what was being said, and he inquired with Nori about it, but his friend only smiled and told him that his hunger would no longer be a problem. 

The unnecessary secrecy of dwarves was a deeply frustrating flaw in their characters, Bilbo felt, but the dedicated passion of their friendship most certainly was not. For it was no more than a few hours later, after having searched the dungeons further for any sign of their king (to no success at all), that he discovered their plan. On making his rounds to visit his friends once more, he found that each of them had set aside a tenth of their meals, and a few sips of their water, so that he would go neither hungry nor thirsty. He had attempted to protest, for he could surely continue to steal away food as he had so far been doing, and a tenth of their food would equal more than a whole meal altogether – but of course they would hear none of it, saying that they weren’t really all that hungry anyway, and that hobbits were ridiculous and had to eat one-hundred-and-twenty percent of a meal as it was, so it only made sense. 

Kili, in fact, had attempted to give Bilbo all of his water – but Bilbo had suspected his purpose in doing so, and after being reassured that just because elves sometimes drank mushroom-infused deer urine that did not mean they only did the young dwarf had rather changed his tune on the matter. (Dwalin, of course, had rolled his eyes so ferociously that Bilbo had felt obligated to warn him they might get stuck up there.) 

And so it was that for several days, and in fact nearly a week, Bilbo Baggins wandered – quite undiscovered – through the lightless and gloomy prisons of the great Elvenking Thranduil. Day in and day out he searched for the lost heir to Erebor, though he found neither hide nor hair of the dwarf he looked for. Silently, and in the back of his mind – though he never made mention of it to his friends, who daily asked if their king had yet been discovered – Bilbo began to worry to himself that Thorin was in fact truly lost, whether to some other captor, or to the accursed forest itself. 

And despite the food his friends so kindly provided, Bilbo found himself increasingly weakened by his time there. He wore the ring almost constantly, even to sleep, and it whispered to him in a dark language he hated to understand. Soon enough, he came to recognize the world in only pale and murky shades of grey, and even when he hid himself away for short periods of time and removed the horrible thing it was often only to gaze upon a sea of unending and eternal lightlessness. His dreams were similarly colorless, and they were dark and horrible besides. He hadn’t had nightmares since long before he’d reached the age of majority, but now he found that the devious delusions of his innermost thoughts were visited upon him once more, and often he dreamt of each member of their company meeting their untimely deaths in some terribly preventable fashion. Occasionally, these nightmares even included Gandalf, and it was those which irked him most of all – for he felt the wizard was more than capable of taking care of himself, and it was hardly fair that his fate should also rest on Bilbo’s tiny shoulders. 

On and on this continued, until at last he plucked up the courage and desperation to steal away into the private chambers of the Elvenking for the entirety of a night, in the hopes of finding out something new about their situation. And when indeed he received the first small piece of good news which had reached his pointed ears in far too long a time, he nearly wept at hearing it, and almost gave himself away completely. 

****** 

Thorin turned the acorn over and over in his hands. 

And over and over. 

And over and over. 

It had been with no small amount of luck that he had smuggled it successfully past the despicable blackguards who held him prisoner – for as they had roughly removed his weapons and patted him down as if he were some sort of common animal, he had managed to tuck the little token into the waistband of his pants, and somehow they had missed it. 

And now he felt it was all he had left in the world. 

And so continued to turn it, over and over – the fingers that touched it delicate and unsure, gripped as he was by the fear that he would unknowingly crush it in the endless dark. 

And as he turned, he thought. 

He did not know how long it was that he had been held a prisoner in the dungeons of the elvish scum, and indeed the passage of time could only be marked by intermittent assemblies that were forced upon him by their loathsome king. Thranduil, the beardless dog that he was, had far too often insisted that Thorin be retrieved from his solitary confinement and brought to his hollow halls – for no purpose, it seemed, other than to deliver anew his stale diatribe about what it was he thought of those who attempted to steal themselves beyond his borders. And when at last the odious cretin managed to tire of the sound of his own voice, he would only then banish Thorin deeper into the depths where he was kept, though to Thorin it had all begun to feel very much the same. 

It could have been days, or weeks, or merely hours that he had been locked up so far beneath the forest, and he had not seen a single sign of his company in the interim. He hoped that they had not been captured, though in equal measure he hoped that they had, for if they were not near to him somewhere in these accursed caverns it was very possible the dark woods they had traveled had somehow swallowed them whole. 

It mattered little, though, at the end of it all. For when they had last found themselves in such a poor position it had been Bilbo who had served as their savior, and now without him there was little hope of escape. 

In truth, Thorin had decided long ago – and, in fact, on the morning of the second first day of their journey – that were they to inadvertently land themselves once more in such an unfortunate position as to visit the Silvan kingdom at all, he would be more than content to promise Thranduil the damnable jewels he so determinedly sought. For much as Thorin loathed to allow his enemy anything, it would be far better for them both if they were to create even the emptiest of allyships, which would certainly serve them better than nothing at all in the Battle of the Five Armies. And besides, the riches beneath his mountain were not nearly so precious to him as they had once been, and indeed he would feel little regret at all at knowing the dark power they held over him was minutely dispersed at so great and unappealing a distance. 

This, however, had been before their unforgivable trickery in the woods. Before they had shown him the face of his long-lost love, with no more remorse in the matter than would a fisherman luring in a trout. There was no absolution in all the world which the elves could hope for after so despicable a hoax, and even rarer was the chance that Thorin would ever deign to grant it to them. It was unspeakable, and unfeeling – and despite his already extant faithlessness in the ethics of elves, he found that it had hurt him deeply.

He sat for a good long while in the impenetrable dark, and soon enough it became nothing more than a void which surrounded him on all sides. A vast and unending dimness into which he could pour his grief, which equally seemed to have no end. He felt a deep remorse for a great many things, and his failure in leading his company to the home he had promised them was not at all least among these. But still, after many hours of self-reproach, his thoughts only ever returned to Bilbo. 

He had hardly known his hobbit for more than a year, when his lifetimes were set side by side such as they were. And though their time together had hardly been linear nor long, to Thorin it had still felt like a steady progression to something truly grand. He did not know just when exactly he had begun to love Bilbo, for he had been far too foolish to notice it until he was so swept away by his powerlessness to the feeling that he woke up one morning to discover his heart had long-since been lost. And once, very long ago, they two had built a sort of friendship, in that time which was now similarly swept away. They had been close, had shared their thoughts and feelings with one another with the sort of tender nervousness which accompanies hope. He could never be certain if that Bilbo of the past had loved him in the way he wanted, but he had known the comfort of the fact that his burglar had loved him in some sort of way at all. 

And then Thorin had allowed himself to die in his arms, which – in a twice-lived lifetime of foolishness, was perhaps one of his greatest mistakes. And when he had awoken once more to this strange and similar new world, he found that the love he had built little by little each day had not faltered in the slightest, and he was still very much mired in the middle of it. Bilbo had not known him then, of course, but there had been the reassuring hope that one day it was just possible he would want to. 

Now, though, Thorin felt little but fear. Fear that he would one day forget his little hobbit’s face, and fear in equal measure that it would haunt him forever. 

It was then, there, in the ceaseless dark, that Thorin finally began to cry. 

His tears sprung up suddenly and rather unasked for, and began to run hot and bitter down his face, before tangling in his beard and soaking the front of his tunic. And he poured them, too, into the endless and expansive lightlessness before him, and wished that the vacuous space of it would absorb even a little of the burden his heart bore. 

His chest felt gripped by the unrelenting and vice-like grasp of his loss, and his throat burned and ached unkindly as unexpected sobs passed through it in arrhythmic sequence with his shuddering breaths. And he found he did not know whether his eyes were open or shut, given the gloom he wallowed in, only that that they burned too. 

He continued on like this for a long and unquantifiable while, for the passage of time was as obscured to him as was his own hand in front of his face, and he found he cared little whether any elven guard might hear him and mock him, for love and loss are feelings far more powerful than pride. 

And then a small voice cut through the darkness. 

“Thorin?” 

He paused for a moment, certain he had only imagined it. 

“Thorin, is that you?” 

He looked up with a jolt, somewhat surprised to discover that his eyes had indeed been closed, and in his sightlessness a pale grey sliver of light from a door left ajar in the hallway outside his cell had pierced his blackened solitude. 

“Thorin? That is you, isn’t it? Oh, it’s so dreadfully dark... What on earth those awful elves are thinking in keeping you in here, I really don’t know. Are you alright?” 

He knew that voice. He knew who it belonged to. 

He knew just where the body that once created it lay, and he knew this breed of elven trickery. 

“Thorin, are you alright?” the counterfeit voice asked once more, seeming quite convincingly worried. “You sound as if you’re in pain. Has something happened?” 

“Begone, you devilish specter,” Thorin growled. “I know your elven tricks, and I will caution you only once that you ought not dare to test me by using my name as he once did.” 

“What on earth are you on about?” the voice continued on peevishly, though Thorin could not see its source even with the faint illumination its presence had apparently provided him. “I’m a hobbit, not an elf, as you well know!” 

“You are nothing at all,” Thorin growled. “Show yourself, you damned trickster. It is a coward’s prerogative, to hide so in the dark.” 

“Oh, right, of course,” the voice mumbled, and after a moment the shadowy outline of a halfling appeared just outside his cell. 

Whatever dark enchantment was at play, it certainly did look like Bilbo, just as the one in the forest had. Although, upon further inspection, Thorin found it very odd that they had gone so far as to make his love appear lean and bedraggled, when the illusion they had first cast to capture him had shown his hobbit as the very picture of good humor and health, as if he had never left the safety of the Shire at all. 

“There you go, you foolish dwarf,” said the little illusion. “It hardly makes a difference, in this wretched darkness, but here I am.” 

Thorin found he could not speak for several moments, for the deception was a rather powerful one, and it was with great difficulty that he forcefully reminded himself that it was – in fact – a deception at all. 

“Why am I to be cursed with your presence?” he demanded, at long last. “Is it not enough for the Elvenking that I am left in the deepest of his cellars to rot? This is far beyond the pale of cruelty.” 

The specter let out a very Bilbo-ish huff of annoyance, and Thorin’s heart clenched to hear it. 

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re as unreasonably rude as ever, Master Oakenshield!” it replied, throwing up its shadowy hands with pointed exasperation. “I’ve spent the last few days devising your escape, I’ll have you know, but I’m sure it was ridiculous of me to expect some sort of thanks for doing so. And there Balin was, thinking you’d be glad to find me alive…” 

Thorin felt that this was certainly an odd thing to say, for he very much doubted that any of his captors had bothered to learn any dwarven name other than his own. And the strangeness of it, the very uncalculated peculiarity, lit a small pilot light of hope in the dim of his heart. 

“Balin… the others are here too, then?” he asked – for even if this was a deception, he may glean some information from it. 

“Oh, yes, yes,” replied the enchantment, fiddling with something in its pocket in a way that appeared very unconscious and very real. “All alive and well, though none too happy. Dwalin will be very glad to hear I’ve found you at last. He’s been demanding to know your whereabouts from any elf that passes him by, and they’ve seemed to take a rather cruel delight in keeping any idea of your survival from him. How these elves are at all related to Elrond’s good people, I have no idea. The manners on them…” 

It was then that Thorin realized he might be able to catch this conjured visage in its deceit, and to extinguish his fruitless longing before it began to rage uncontrollably within him. 

“Elrond…” he muttered. “Master Baggins, at the Last Homely House you had a conversation with Lord Elrond. What did you speak to him about?” 

It was a question to which he already knew the answer, for in truth he had sat in silence and watched their friendly exchange unfold for far longer than he had admitted, before he had been overcome with despair at their closeness and finally interrupted. Upon reflection, he felt that it was possible that Elrond had been aware of his presence the entire time, and had even guessed his intentions in lurking, but – annoying though this was to consider – that was neither here nor there. 

“My conversation with… why on earth are you asking me that now?” Bilbo demanded, and Thorin’s mistrust grew with his reticence. 

“My reasons are none of your concern,” he growled. “Answer me.” 

Bilbo gave that same huff of exasperation, which Thorin would not allow himself to be swayed by, before at last he answered. 

“We… we spoke of a great many things,” he began, leaning forward against the confines of Thorin’s cell as he attempted to recall. “I believe I shared with him my doubts as to the quality of dwarvish poetry... He asked me if I would like to stay with him, and I said no. He asked me if your company were truly my friends, and I said I was not sure. And he told me a story about the Doors of Durin in Moria, which were made for the love of a dwarf and-” 

At this point he was cut off, for Thorin had thrown himself from his seated position in the corner of his cell right against the bars, and had gathered him up in a fierce and devoted hug. It was hardly half of what might have been ideal, separated as they were by cold and unrelenting iron, but it was far more than Thorin had ever hoped to have had again, and he found that what few stray tears were still left within him escaped into the wild and uncombed hair of the one he held so desperately close. 

Bilbo did not seem to mind this, though, and in fact – after a moment of stupor – he returned the hug with an unexpected ardor of his own. Unlike the embrace they had once shared upon the carrock, his hobbit was not gentle now, and did not offer any light and comforting pats on Thorin’s back. Rather, Bilbo gripped his tunic in tight fistfuls, and tucked his head awkwardly into Thorin’s shoulder between the bars that separated them, and seemed intent on pulling him clean through the cell that divided their embrace as if he were truly loathe to be separated from him. 

And once more, Thorin was lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slight wait, but I hope the content of this chapter makes up for the delay! I had finals this week, as well as some work deadlines, but better late than never. Hope you're all well, and thanks as always for reading.


	13. Chapter 13

Somewhere, in the grand halls of the Woodland Realm, there were candlelit rooms filled with warmth and good cheer, and plenty of elves which filled them. And somewhere further, past lark and lake, a dragon slumbered peacefully in the faint and shimmering light of unquenchable fire and endless hills of gold. 

Far, far below them all, however, a small hobbit and a little dwarf king sat side by side in the darkness. And though they were separated by bars of great iron, and yet further by the vast multitudes of words left unspoken, there was a lightness between them that banished even the darkest of shadows from their notice, enough so that the oppressive dimness of their resting place oughtn’t to have bothered to loom over them at all. 

Theirs had been a joyful reunion, in the end, nearly even to the extent they deserved. And after their long embrace had ended, and reassurances of each member of the company’s safety had been given, the two of them had silently and tentatively agreed to simply sit against the wall together, so close that their shoulders might have touched were they not so forcibly separated. 

“Why did you ask me about my discussion with Elrond, earlier?” Bilbo asked after a long period of stillness, which had to that point only been broken occasionally by casual remarks upon various subjects of no importance (for to the both of them, in their own ways, it was wonderful enough just to be talking at all, even if there was little they dared to say). 

Thorin bowed his head at the question, and Bilbo wondered for a moment if he might have made the king angry, but when at last he responded his tone was even and indifferent. 

“You must pardon my rudeness, I was… When the elves captured us in their accursed forest, they baited me with a variety of illusions, and you were amongst them. I thought, perhaps… That is, I suspected they might be toying with me once more. You must believe, we all truly thought you dead. I ought to have gone back to be certain, but-” 

“Oh, never mind that,” Bilbo interrupted, anticipating as he did that the impending apology would do little but make them both uncomfortable. “It’s hardly an answer to my question, at any rate. Why did you ask about Rivendell, of all things?” 

“I hoped that to present a question to which only you would know the answer might betray their deceit,” Thorin responded carefully. 

“But then, how did you expect to know whether I told the truth?” Bilbo demanded. “Unless, of course… Surely you weren’t watching us?” 

Thorin did not reply, and only ducked his head once more, grabbing one of the bars by his waist in a tight grip as if he’d be rather glad to have his sword with him (though, of course, it would do him little good against the true ire of a hobbit). 

“I… You must understand, Master Burglar, I did not intend-” he began at last, his words coming out all at once. 

“You did, didn’t you!” Bilbo cried – perhaps a tad more dramatically than his feelings really warranted, and this was truly very Tookish of him. 

“I assure you, I have much better things to do with my time than to spy upon halflings and elves,” Thorin insisted rather grumpily. 

“Then why weren’t you doing any of them?” Bilbo teased. 

For a moment, Thorin sat in stunned silence, and then – as if he had given it some consideration, and come to the conclusion that he would allow himself to – he began to laugh, his quiet chuckles rumbling straight from his chest and into Bilbo’s weak little heart. 

“A fair point, Master Burglar,” the dwarf conceded.

“And well made, too,” Bilbo added, and Thorin was certain he could hear the very pleased grin he wore in the way he said it – though it was hidden from him in the darkness. 

“It is Bilbo to you, though,” the hobbit continued, after a short pause. “If you would like it to be, anyway.” 

“I’m honored by your allowance, though I do not entirely believe I deserve it,” his companion responded, a bit gruffly. “And I believe I have always been Thorin to you, for you have called me as much a few times before. But you may do so henceforth with my permission, if that holds any meaning to you.” 

“It does, Thorin,” Bilbo said quietly, “of course it does.” 

They fell to silence once more, and Thorin became so still that Bilbo began to wonder if he might have fallen asleep, before his deep voice whispered so carefully that the sound of it did not even part the darkness enough to reach the far-off walls which might have hoped to echo it. 

“Did you truly mean what you said to Lord Elrond, all that time ago?” he asked, his inflection wavering a bit breathlessly in a way that was so unlike him. “Do you really think that we dwarves cannot love anything that is not tough and severe, like unto stone?”

Bilbo wondered at the question, for it was certainly an odd one, though he wondered a great deal more at the carefully contained urgency with which it was delivered. 

“Goodness me,” he laughed nervously, “you really were there for the whole of the conversation, weren’t you?” 

He considered his response carefully before he gave it – for though he could not put his finger on exactly why this might be, he felt his answer was perhaps an important one. 

“I think…” he began at last, “… that is, I know your people value things rather differently from my own. Which is not to say that I feel you are wrong to do so, of course. They are only differences in tradition, after all. But hobbits tend to love nothing more than a nice wide hearth, and a lovely home, and someone wonderful to share it all with. It’s all softness and smooth edges, with my lot, though certainly there are exceptions. And with you dwarves… If you will forgive me, I presumed your values were similarly expressed. You expect the same hardiness and strength from the world that you wish from yourselves, and I extrapolated from that my assumption that you would want something akin to that from your partners… Am I wrong?” 

“No,” Thorin responded, after a pause for consideration of his own, “no you are not. We value bravery and endurance a good deal. I fear, however, that you might misunderstand how we define them. A rock may survive a storm, but so too does the grass around it – and it is not so important to compare how they did it as to admire that they have done it at all, if that makes any sense.” 

“Ah,” said Bilbo, though he felt it didn’t. It seemed, however, that whatever it was that Thorin was trying to tell him was rather important to the dwarf, and he did not want to infuriate him with his cultural confusion. So instead he only nodded a moment further, and remained rather diplomatically silent. 

This time, however, the quiet did not last quite so long before Thorin broke it again. 

“Would you tell me about them?” he murmured lowly. “I do not mean to break your confidence with my kin, but Fili told me you once loved someone. I just… Perhaps I might understand the differences in our views on this subject, if I knew…” 

He trailed off in a rather uncharacteristic bout of uncertainty, and Bilbo found that he did not quite know how to answer. What on earth he had done in either of his lives to warrant the situation which now befell him, he could not imagine, but he was apparently to be tasked with describing his love to the very dwarf who did not recognize it, and likely would not return it if he did. Dratted Fili… 

“He was…” Bilbo began slowly, suddenly noticing just how disagreeably cold the hard stone beneath him was, and shifting uncomfortably with the realization. “He was rather wonderful, and thoroughly infuriating... I knew him years and years ago, you see, and it wasn’t even for all that long. But I am sure that what I felt will last me more than a lifetime.” 

“And was he soft and sweet, as the love of a hobbit ought to be?” Thorin asked, his insistence on continuing with the topic not at all matching his tone of deep disinterest. 

Bilbo snorted. 

“Oh no, not at all,” he said, entertained by the very thought. “In fact, he was more commonly rather rough and rude. But his heart was among the kindest and most loyal of any I have ever known, and that is of far greater importance.” 

“And how then did he impress you so?” Thorin continued to question with urgent apathy. “I cannot pretend to know what hobbits value, but among the dwarrow it is feats of bravery and great achievements which garner the most admirers.” 

“Oh, he was certainly very brave,” said Bilbo, who was becoming increasingly amused by the ridiculousness of it all. “Though to my people that tends to be considered a fault. When we marry someone, we want them to be alive and well for the majority of it, you see. No, it’s the regular things which matter to us most.” 

“The regular things?” asked Thorin, his even tone now tempered with confusion. 

“Yes, yes, you know…” Bilbo elaborated, suddenly finding it oddly difficult to explain himself. “He certainly accomplished a great deal, which even my dreadful cousin-by-marriage Lobelia would struggle to scoff at. But when he wasn’t doing this or that impressive thing we often laughed, and ate together, and argued quite a bit about things that hardly mattered... Those are the memories I treasure most. In truth, though, I haven’t the slightest idea if he ever felt the same way, or if he ever could’ve. He died before I had the chance to ask… But I must admit, even though it’s the ordinary things we hobbits value, I fear that somehow might be much worse. Nothing about the world was ever the same without him. Not a day went by, even years later, when I wouldn’t stand in my kitchen and wish I were making my breakfast for two.” 

He continued on, babbling a bit, for he now realized he had been offered the rare chance to say a great many things he had so long kept silent. And even though Thorin had gone rather still again, which led Bilbo to suspect he had become quite bored, he could not stop himself. 

“You know, I once wrote a book of all our little adventures,” he mused, nearly to himself at this point, “but I must confess I hardly did him justice. I couldn’t gather the nerve to put it all down, you see… All those little moments that meant so much, where very little happened at all. I would have liked to put them to the page, of course - in fact, I sometimes feared I would forget them if I didn’t. But to document something is to affix it to the past, and though you may consider me a coward for it, I hadn’t the courage to face the present on my own, or to consider a tomorrow without him in it.”

“The future is a formidable foe, but it must be met,” said Thorin quietly, and Bilbo’s heart stuttered in an odd little way at hearing him say so. 

After having said far more than he should, Bilbo found that he had nothing more to say at all. Rather unluckily, however, he was spared from his search for a more appropriate topic by the gentle tinkling thud of something falling from his pocket and rolling away from him. 

His Ring. 

“What’s this?” Thorin asked, picking it up with casual curiosity. 

And then Bilbo’s heart, which had for a short while only been rather warm and filled to the brim with a fluttering sort of nervousness, was at once plunged into the depths of a vast and icy fear. He had long dreaded the thought that Thorin might ever come into any sort of proximity with the burden he carried – for he knew the weaknesses of his friend and king all too well, and the terrible pull of the Ring was one of far greater power than any measure of jewels and gold, and far more terrible than any being of such importance as he could resist. 

And it was his Ring, after all. Why should anybody else touch it? 

“It is nothing!” he cried, far louder than was entirely wise, given the secrecy of his presence. “Just a token, and a rather personal one, at that. Give it here, quickly!” 

And though Thorin rather jealously suspected he knew just who it was who had once given his hobbit the plain little trinket, he found he was at once overwhelmed by a dark and greedy desire to do anything at all that might make his Bilbo happy, and he returned the unimpressive piece of jewelry with little further thought to keeping it.

Were he the one who held Bilbo’s affections, he mused, he would gift him a beautiful ring of his own making for every little finger, all of a level of craftsmanship his hobbit truly deserved. And he would kiss each one with reverence, as well as the hands which wore them, and consider himself rather lucky to do so. 

But this was not to be, he reminded himself, and he wondered at the ferocity with which he had abandoned his hopelessness at just the moment when it ought to have become most apparent. 

Bilbo seemed to be rather oddly affected by their little exchange, however, and he fiddled with the ring in his pocket a tad nervously as he stood. 

“I ought to be going,” he rushed to say. “The other dwarves will be wondering where I’ve gone… I quite lost track of time, and it’s likely I’ve left them for hours now. And they must be made aware of your presence, of course.” 

“Of course,” Thorin agreed softly, and he stood as well. 

“I’m working to get you out,” Bilbo continued absently, as his thoughts seemed to be flitting off elsewhere. “That is, I’m sure I have a way, and it will merely be a matter of patience until it can be enacted.” 

“Do not worry on my account,” Thorin attempted to sooth him, gripping the bars which separated them and very consciously wishing they were of a softer metal so that he might rend them apart and somehow bridge the odd divide he felt growing between them. “I have nothing but faith in you, Master Baggins.” 

“Bilbo,” the hobbit corrected, seeming to recall where he was at once. 

“Bilbo,” Thorin amended, with a small smile. 

Bilbo hesitated, then, as if unsure what sort of goodbye their developing friendship might warrant. 

“Well, I’ll be off then,” he said at last, rocking back and forth on his heels a bit awkwardly. “Expect me when you see me, or perhaps much sooner, and likely with plenty of messages from your company, if I know them at all.” 

And with no more farewell then that, he spun around and took his leave. 

Helpless to do anything else, Thorin watched him go, the murky outline of his shadow barely visible in the endless dim. And silently, in his heart, he prayed that Bilbo would turn his head, even for just a moment, and look back at him as he left. That he might give any indication at all that there may be some small niche where he had carved himself a place in the hobbit’s thoughts. That he might be present in his heart even when they were not near. 

But Bilbo did not turn, of course, and Thorin only watched with uncomfortable sense of both familiarity and foreboding as a terrible darkness swallowed his hobbit whole.

****** 

It was for several more weeks that Bilbo was forced to relay messages between the dwarrow and their king, and though they all ensured he was well-fed (even Thorin, who of course had not been privy to their planning, and had begun to save a rather ridiculous portion of his meals by his own accord), he nevertheless found that he was rather easily drained by it. It was not the effort which he found difficult – for especially after he had resigned himself to waiting until such time as he could enact their previous escape, and had thereafter eagerly abandoned his fruitless exploration of the elven halls entirely, it was then only a short distance which he was required to walk every day, back and forth between the moderately spaced confines of his friends, and once or twice much further down to visit their king. Yet he was weakened by it regardless, for he felt it was the place itself that had begun to get to him. Beautiful as the caves of the Woodland Realm were – for, being elvish, they could hardly help it – they still lacked in the warmth and sunlight which nearly all creatures require, and hobbits most of all. 

Bilbo soon found that he became accustomed to wearing his Ring, and that to take it off caused him great distress. And though he was certain it was merely the fear of being caught that plagued him so, with the very future of Middle Earth depending upon his freedom, it nevertheless made him rather nervous, and he very much looked forward to the fast-approaching day when they would make their escape, and he could tuck it safely back in his pocket for a while longer. 

The dwarves, for their part, took to their captivity with as much grace as could be expected – which was, of course, none at all. In particular, they began to delight in softly singing the bawdiest of their songs in tandem, which caused their fair captors no small amount of infuriated confusion. When they were not using Bilbo to ferry directives for their childish pranks, however, the majority of them seemed to delight in fussing over him – and he further began to look forward with great anticipation to the coming days when they would have more to occupy their time than to debate whether or not he was looking the slightest bit peaky, or if perhaps it was just the light.

Oín, unsurprisingly, was among the worst of them, and often enough Bilbo found himself submitting to what limited examinations could be managed through the bars of a cell – most of which consisted of rather obnoxious poking and prodding, with only the conversation of an interminably jovial Fili to keep him from smacking the old dwarf’s hands away and marching off for good. 

“Have you and Uncle talked much, then?” the young prince asked one day, with an odd tone of voice that Bilbo elected not to question, given the general oddness of the one he was dealing with. 

“A bit,” he responded, wheezing slightly as a strong dwarven finger gave a sharp poke right in the rather unimpressive remains of his once-proud belly. “I visit him almost daily, as you know, and we chat a little whenever I do.” 

“And what do you talk about?” Fili inquired, his delivery suggesting that there was certainly a correct answer to his question, though Bilbo couldn’t imagine what on earth it could be. 

“This and that,” said Bilbo, swatting away Oín’s hand just as it reached to feel his forehead for the third time that day. “How the company is doing, what Erebor was like once upon a time… you and your brother, on occasion.” 

“Really?” Fili demanded, dropping his attempt at aloofness at the mere mention, just as Bilbo had intended. “What does he say?” 

“Well we’ve certainly made some jokes at your expense, you’ll be unsurprised to hear,” Bilbo teased. “But he has also referred to you two as his pride and joy on more than one occasion, though of course you must never let him know that I told you so.” 

Fili blushed at the secondhand praise – the red of his cheeks looking a tad ridiculous against his honey-blonde beard, in a sweet sort of way. And Bilbo felt a rush of protectiveness at remembering just how young and fragile his friend was, and how he’d once been denied the opportunity to become the great king he was certainly destined to be. 

“You and Uncle could get along quite well, if you tried,” the prince said, seemingly desperate for a change in the conversation now that his vulnerability was so obviously betrayed. 

“If you’ll recall, I was always perfectly pleasant to him,” Bilbo clarified, a bit affronted at being cast equal blame in the matter. “It was he who behaved otherwise. But of course he has apologized, a few too many times, truth be told. And now we are right as rain, I think.” 

“That is good,” Fili responded, and he seemed genuinely pleased. “He has never expressed himself well. According to my mother, it’s because he never feels any less than ten things at once, and he doesn’t know enough words to explain them all properly. But you can be sure that despite his occasional ire, he does not dislike you in the least. Truly, Bilbo, he cares for you a great deal.” 

“Thank you, Fili,” said Bilbo, for though he knew the dwarf in question far better than his young friend might suspect, he was not nearly above appreciating a bit of reassurance from one of the few who knew Thorin best – especially this Thorin of his present, who was yet an odd enigma to him in more ways than one. “I believe we have struck up a sort of friendship… or at the very least we have begun to get along, as you hope.” 

“And just how well are you getting along, then?” Fili asked slyly. 

Bilbo paused for a moment, for in truth the question confused him – but the suggestive expression on Fili’s face elaborated his meaning well enough, and if it hadn’t the waggling of his eyebrows would have more than finished the job. 

“Well!” Bilbo spluttered, for a lack of anything better to say. “What on earth gave you that impression, I have no idea!” 

He received no more response than a snort – though he was very surprised to find that it had not come from Fili, but rather from Oín, whom he had not been entirely aware could even hear them. 

“We couldn’t possibly, the thought is ridiculous,” he declared further in a rambling sort of way, for he was now thoroughly embarrassed that his infatuation had apparently been so obvious to his friends, and mortifyingly aware that he was likely sporting a rather impressive blush of his own. “We’re very different from each other, he and I.” 

“Aye,” Oín drawled with a rather pleased smile, “that’s one of the many things ye have in common.” 

Bilbo wrestled himself from the healer’s grasp, then, for he was quite certain there was nothing further to be gained from this particular visit than a yet deeper embarrassment. It was with a great deal of continued vexation, however, that he quickly discovered the two dwarrow were not alone in their impressions of him, and before long even Balin had begun to make rather diplomatic hints as to the issue. 

“Of course,” the old dwarf had said, during one of their longer chats, “when Thorin is crowned there will be certain expectations that he take a consort. Someone who tempers him well, and might balance his diplomatic weaknesses with our neighbors to the south.” 

Bilbo had appreciated the kindness in the fact that his friend had not addressed the subject outright. It was quite clear that he was not at all suited to the role to which Balin alluded, and though for a variety of reasons he had no expectations of any future with Thorin, it was yet still a far gentler way to express the impossibility of their pairing than the more pressing truth that his love was not reciprocated in the slightest. 

“Erebor deserves the most devoted and capable leadership it can be given, I’m sure,” he had responded, rather proud of the way his heart only hurt a little in conceding the accuracy of Balin’s point. And his friend had given him a satisfied little smile at his reply, so he had rather gladly considered the matter settled between them. 

Luckily, time continued its dull and endless march as it always did, for even the elves in their forested hiding places cannot distance themselves from its immortal beat entirely. And soon enough, the day of their escape was upon them. 

It was with great relief that Bilbo found the cadence of the day to be largely unchanged. The chief of the guards was once more persuaded to partake of a stolen sample of the king’s strong Dorwinian wine, and his flagon proved to be far too large a serving for one so used to sweeter stuff. In the end, it was not so very long at all before Bilbo was leaving the Elvenking’s wine cellars with a ring of rather essential keys in his pocket, and steeped in a certain amount of well-deserved smugness. 

He rescued Balin and Bombur first, and they were of course very impressed with him, and insisted on saying so for far longer than he had the time to spare. Fili and Oín were next, and they likewise exalted him with praises of various comprehensibility, until he simply walked away and continued his mission without any further regard to their opinions of his cleverness. 

And on and on he went, until he had amassed a small parade of twelve dwarrow that followed at his heels, and when at last he had convinced them that quietness was of the utmost importance in their escape – and that bashing their heads together in a raucous greeting was largely antithetical to that goal – they departed into the very depths of the dungeons, to retrieve their lost king.

Despite the bumblings and whisperings of the dratted dwarves – who were apparently incapable of stealth, with but one notable exception – they at last managed to sneak their way down to the very heart of the earth, and yet a while further, until at last they arrived at the wretched hold where Thorin was kept. 

He was perhaps the most impressed of all at Bilbo’s cunning, and though he fumbled in the dark a bit, he clapped Bilbo gently on the shoulder in a brief affirmation of his skill. This seemed to please the other dwarves, whom Bilbo could see nodding rather excitedly in a shadowy sort of way, and he elected to pay them no mind at all for the remainder of their departure. 

This suited him rather well, until at last they arrived in the wine cellars once more, and he was forced to explain the details of his plan to the lot of them. 

“We shall be bruised and battered to pieces, only to be drowned soon thereafter!” they complained, each in their own variations. “What madness this is!” 

“Very well!” Bilbo exclaimed, tired with the lot of them. “Why don’t I escort you back to your cells then, and lock you up once more so you can have the proper time to think of a better idea yourselves. You can steal the keys again too, when you’ve got one, for I’m sure I won’t come up with another opportunity if I’m given a year to do it!” 

Though somewhat chastened by his remarks, his friends were still rather reluctant to follow through with his dangerous plan, and it was not until their king interceded that they truly ceased their protests. 

“Do as he says,” Thorin commanded sternly, and between the insistence of the two of them the company found there was little room left for argument. 

“This is absolute madness,” Kili muttered. “And to think we had hoped they might settle each other down.” 

Dwalin snorted at that, though Bilbo hadn’t the least idea what the young dwarf had meant, and when soon he came to them he hammered the lids on the both of their barrels with a somewhat unnecessary force. 

Before long, it was only he and Thorin who yet remained unbarrel-ed, and it was then that he encountered a problem. 

“And where will you be stowed?” Thorin inquired, his earlier admiration now somewhat abated by the obvious flaw in Bilbo’s plan. 

In truth, the king was perfectly right to feel so, for once again Bilbo had forgotten to include himself in their plot to escape. But Bilbo was loathe to admit his own oversight to anyone, and particularly to Thorin, so instead he did little but fold his arms together and begin to tap his toes rather stubbornly. 

“And what business is it of yours, Master Oakenshield? Now get into a barrel at once so I can put the lid over you and be done with this whole affair. Quickly now, I’m certain there isn’t much time.” 

“Thorin,” the king corrected him, seeming rather unmoved by his pushiness. “You are right that there’s not a moment to spare, which is why you ought to climb in yourself so I can make sure you are properly secured.” 

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” Bilbo exclaimed. “Whose plan is this, exactly? If I say I have a method of escape then you can presume that is exactly what I have!” 

“And do you, then?” Thorin asked calmly. 

“Of all the-” Bilbo began, before Bofur’s muffled voice cut him off from one of the barrels nearest. 

“Absolutely daft, the both of you!” he exclaimed crossly, his vehemence rattling his wooden holding a bit and threatening to tip him right over. “My beard will wither and fall off if I have to hear much more of this. Just sort yourselves out before we all get caught, it’s terribly cramped in here.” 

Muted murmurs of assent came from all around them, and Thorin and Bilbo shared a look of annoyance with the company they kept. 

In the end, it was decided that Bilbo would be stowed away first. He had protested a great deal, to begin with, but Thorin had only to pick him up and set him inside a barrel himself for the matter to be resolved, and though he was angrier than a tomcat at his confinement he had to admit he was very glad to be running a far lesser risk of getting himself ill through exposure to the icy river waters this go-round. 

He had no idea how it was Thorin managed to hide himself away, but it seemed the dwarf had accomplished it somehow or another, for it was not so very long after that when they heard the distant voices of the king’s servants as they approached. 

“-and old Galion really ought to be here, only he wasn’t at the tables tonight,” a rather fine-sounding voice said somewhere very far away. 

“I shall be rather angry if he is late,” came another speaker, whose voice was similarly beautiful, though distinct in its own way. “The dances are singularly splendid tonight, and we oughtn’t be doing this without him.” 

“Ha!” came the first voice once more. “Here he is, having a feast of his own with his good friend the captain. It seems a shame to wake them, though a jug for a pillow seems hardly ideal.” 

“Well, shake them! Wake them!” exclaimed the second elf, rather rudely. “I haven’t the time for this nonsense.” 

Old Galion, under whose charge the barrels were laid, was of course rather cross at being so unkindly awoken, and was doubly so at being laughed at. And in his drunkenness and rancor he made the mistake of checking the barrels in his care with a thoroughness that was only thoroughly lacking, just as he once had before. 

And so it was that before they knew it, the dwarves were listening to the fading refrains of an elvish work tune, as they were tossed into the chilly and churning river that ran through the caverns of the Woodland Realm, and were carried with it far, far away from their most ungracious hosts. 

***** 

There were a great many times in their perilous trip when Bilbo found himself yearning for his home, and for his little armchair beside the fire. But never before had he missed that comfort quite so terribly as he did during their graceless departure to Lake-town. 

The river that ferried them along was surely still fed by the remains of the winter’s runoff from the snowy Grey Mountains, for despite the fact that he was kept dry enough by the wood that surrounded him on all sides, it quickly became almost burningly frigid to the touch. To not touch it, however, was far worse, for then he was tossed and battered, bruised and tattered, and cast helplessly through the current with little to brace himself against its torment. At the very least, he was quite relieved to rid himself of the Ring for the time being, and as he secured it back in his pocket with a sense of impermanent finality, he discovered that he was far more tired than he had fully known. 

And so, with little else to do, he curled into a tight little ball, doing his best to wedge himself into as unshakeable and warm a position as he could, and dozed off into an enormously fretful sleep. Luckily, what his rest lacked in comfort it made up for in constancy, and after a good long while it was the shouting of his name which woke him at last. 

“Bilbo! Bilbo! Where is Bilbo!” came the cries of a few of his friends, though he was somewhat surprised to hear Thorin’s voice was the loudest of them all. 

“Bilbo! Oh, where could our burglar have gone?” fretted Dori, who sounded quite near. 

“Imagine if he was swept away with the current!” wailed Ori, who was – unsurprisingly – at his brother’s side. “Hobbits cannot swim for long, he once told me as much!”

“Quiet!” shouted Thorin, over the raging rush of the river. “We must find him, surely he is here somewhere, among these barrels!” 

“Here!” shouted Bilbo, though he could hardly hear himself over the water, and he began to pound against the lid of his cask in desperation. “I am here!” 

Luckily, it seemed his voice was not lost with the current, and before too long a stream of sunlight blinded him, as the top of his barrel was wrenched away, and a pair of strong hands pulled him from his cramped confinement. 

“Bilbo!” said Thorin with apparent relief. “Why did you not answer us before? We have been searching high and low, we feared we had lost you again.” 

Bilbo stood rather unsteadily after being placed right-side-up in the now-shallow stream, for his joints had cramped and weakened after being held so long in so awkward a position, and it seemed his legs had entirely forgotten how to hold him at all. But he righted himself as Thorin continued to demand an explanation, and he found that he doubted very much that his friends would be at all impressed to hear he had caused them such worry by dozing off, so he felt it was best to avoid the question entirely. 

“You’ll not be so easily rid of me, I’m afraid,” he said with a laugh, though he regretted to see his humor was lost on the dwarven king, for he received only a frown in response. 

“Never mind that,” he continued on hurriedly, “where are we now?” 

“Near the edge of Esgaroth, by Balin’s reckoning,” said Thorin, and as Bilbo’s vision began to adjust to the unfamiliar light of day, he found that his surroundings were somewhat vaguely familiar. 

His friends had all pulled themselves free from their unfortunate means of escape, and while they seemed to have survived the journey well enough, many of them were apparently capable of little else but to lie upon the shoreline and moan rather prolifically. Kili and Fili, however, seemed almost entirely unaffected, and now that they were assured of Bilbo’s safety they were taking great delight in taunting poor Dwalin as he rested – though they quite wisely avoided bothering Balin entirely. Dori was fussing over his two younger brothers, just as they equally attempted to fuss over him, and Bilbo was pleased to see the -Ur family was reunited as well, which culminated in Bofur’s hat being once more returned to its rightful resting place. Oín and Gloín had similarly sought each other out, only to collapse in a heap at each other’s side, and now neither of them moved. 

In the distance, looming over the scene with grand indifference, was the striking ridgelines of the Lonely Mountain – which cut through a veil of mist as uncaringly as shearing scissors through wool, and seemed to mark the surrounding landscape with its proud mark of majesty. It was not so very far off now, Bilbo realized, and all its trials and tribulations with it. 

But tonight they would rest, and though they would surely find little to eat – limited as they were – they would nonetheless laugh and sing and make merry, just as they once had in the days before Bilbo’s absence. 

And tomorrow, they would journey into Lake-town, and soon thereafter they would return to their rightful home, in Erebor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've added a chapter count, finally, and if everything goes to plan we should be wrapping this thing up in.... 10 more chapters.... Or perhaps a few more, because when have plans ever worked. Anyway, thanks as always to everyone who has been reading and commenting, I'm so glad so many people are enjoying this little story as much as I'm enjoying writing it. Hope you're all well!


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick preface: as I've said before, this fic draws from book and movie canon, but in this chapter in particular the beats of the story might be unfamiliar if you're expecting a shot-for-shot remake of the movie. It's not wildly different, especially in intention, but I still wanted to warn you all

Thorin had never been a particularly imaginative dwarf. He was clever, to be sure, and contemplative almost to excess. And he was a romantic most of all, though he hid it well enough. But he had never been the creative sort, if for no other reason than that he had never found the time to become any good at it. 

It was with this firm knowledge of his own limitations that he concluded that he was not dreaming, at the moment – not really, anyway. Certainly, he had recently gone to sleep, tucked away in the humble lodgings they had been provided upon their arrival to Esgaroth, and he was therefore rather confident that he was not at all awake. But his mind could not hope to conjure the delicate detail and comforting constancy of the place he now found himself, and thus he determined that it hadn’t. 

It was a large and nearly endless room, and carved entirely of stone, in the intricately skilled and patient way which only dwarves could manage. It did not run cold, however, as most of their dwellings did, and was instead neither chilled nor warm, but perfectly temperate. The lights which shone about him, affixed to the walls in expert proportions, were neither bright nor dim, and yet they lit the enormous chamber entirely. And upon a throne in the very center of it all sat an enormous dwarf (though he was not a dwarf), who appeared to be rather old (though he was ageless). 

Thorin was, for a moment, surprised by the familiarity he felt in taking in the scene, and was twice so when he realized that even his astonishment was not new to him. He did not dream, nor did he visit the halls of his maker once more, but rather it seemed that he found himself awash in the unconscious current of a well-forgotten memory. This ought not to have shocked him as much as it did, for recollections of his regrets had been his constant companion in the dreaming hours ever since he had awoken to find the world remade anew. But this memory was not tainted by the immediate stench of self-loathing as so many of his others were, nor was it anything he could actually remember at all. Still, he was certain he had seen this place before, though he did not know what had happened here. 

He would not be left to wonder for long, though, for just as had always been the case before in these unconscious reflections of his, he was entirely helpless to his own actions, and could do little more than observe his own choices as he carried them out. This became clear as he patted himself on the chest a bit foolishly, searching for a wound that was no longer there. 

“Where am I?” he demanded, though he was certain that even then he had known quite well enough. 

His creator only greeted the question with a warm smile, which parted his craggy face as if the entirety of his visage had been designed to accommodate it. 

“Thorin, Thráinson, Thrórson, my child,” Mahal’s deep voice boomed throughout the chamber like the crack of a hammer, though neither then nor now did Thorin cower from it. “You have been long awaited, and sorely missed by many in my halls. You are most welcome here.” 

Thorin felt his eyebrows draw together with confusion, even as a frown passed unbidden across his face. “I have died, then?” he asked, and his own voice felt pitifully lost to the enormity of the space where he stood. 

“You have,” replied his maker, and he appeared to offer no condolences, nor to find any issue with the idea at all. “You achieved much, in your time, and returned your people to their homeland most honorably. I have been made proud by you. Now come, your family awaits.” 

And here the great Mahal gestured with one sturdy arm to an entryway only just beyond, which Thorin had not noticed before, though he now saw that a warm light spilt from its parted doors and beckoned him nearer. 

“Frerin?” he asked, his voice hardly more than a whisper (though the ears of the Valar are as perfect as the rest of them, and he was heard regardless). “My mother?” 

Mahal nodded, and smiled once more, as if he was enormously gladdened by the idea of their reuniting. 

“And Fili and Kili too,” his voice rumbled, “though they only arrived a short while before you.” 

“Fili and Kili?” Thorin asked, and he felt his eyes become wet with tears at the confirmation that he had led two of his greatest treasures to their young and undeserved deaths. 

“Yes,” said Mahal – though again, he seemed only to sympathize with Thorin’s heartbreak, and was bothered little by the events which caused it. “They asked after you almost immediately, upon reaching my halls, and I am sure they will be enormously glad to see you. I believe a feast in honor of all those who fell in the battle is to be prepared, and you are to be highly honored there. Now come, it would not do to be late.” 

It was that little phrase which stopped Thorin, who had to that point begun to unconsciously approach the inviting warmth of the unknown place just ahead of him, and had nearly forgotten what it was that he left behind. It was such an oddly familiar thing to say, though, and it reminded him of someone he missed, someone who could not be found in any world but the one he had only so recently departed from. 

“And what of Bilbo?” he asked, though he already feared the answer. “What has become of the hobbit?” 

Mahal seemed hardly surprised by the question, though in truth Thorin was not certain he could be surprised by anything. 

“Bilbo Baggins yet lives,” the comforting voice washed over him, “and he is likely to continue to do so for a good while longer than even I expected.” 

“And is he happy?” Thorin asked tentatively, for he knew he would find no rest – even here, in the Halls of Waiting, where all were to be at peace – if he was not assured that his burglar was safe and distant from him, returned once more to his comfortable armchair and his many books. 

His maker frowned at his question, and for once he looked properly grieved. 

“He is not.” 

“And will he be?” Thorin prodded, with an urgency he was certain was likely rude. “Might he be, one day?” 

For a moment, the great Valar seemed to consider how he might answer such an inquiry, and were Thorin not so thoroughly single-minded at present he might have made himself ashamed at the demands he made of his own creator. 

“I will watch over him, as will my wife Yavanna, who made him,” Mahal began, seeming to choose his words rather carefully. “But I fear there is a darkness that looms on the horizon of the earth where once the sun might have gathered its warmth, and your One has been affixed nearly to the center of it. He mourns for you now, and in truth I must tell you that he may continue to do so for the remainder of his days, for I who created his heart might lay claim to knowing it best. But there is a good deal more he will yet endure before his time comes at last, and I suspect he will suffer greatly.” 

It then seemed to Thorin that the dead might grieve for the living just as ardently as the living mourned the dead, for at hearing this he was filled with an anguish and despair which felt nearly as if it boiled and scalded him from the inside out, and with the knowledge that he could hold it in no longer he gave a small cry of misery that vanished quickly into the well-constructed emptiness of eternity. 

“I cannot go,” he said at last, though he looked to the doors which still bade him nearer, and wished that he might steal even the briefest glimpse of his brother, his parents, or his nephews. 

Mahal seemed very little surprised once more, though a brief glimpse of unhappy contemplation passed upon his calm and knowing face. 

“And whyever not, my child?” his maker nearly demanded, and Thorin felt it would be perfectly right for him to cower now, though he could not allow himself to appear weak in the face of what may yet become his greatest battle. 

“I will not leave him behind to suffer, you cannot ask it of me.” 

Mahal examined him with a calculating and slightly shrewd expression – though it was not as enraged as perhaps it ought to have been, given the insubordinance he was thus shown from one made by his own hand. 

“The happenings of the earth are no longer any of your concern, Thorin Thráinson,” his deep voice cautioned, echoing throughout the stone-hewn halls and nearly causing Thorin’s head to bow with the weight of it. “You now belong in my halls, and among the fallen. This cannot be so easily undone by your passing whim. You may be a king, and exalted amongst my creations, but do not forget your place.” 

“It is no passing fancy, O’ Creator,” Thorin insisted, reverent but nonetheless desperate. “I do not claim to know by what design I was crafted for him, only that I am certain that I was, for I am not whole in his absence. You may damn me, if you must. Condemn me to everlasting stone in compensation, and never again allow me to walk the earth even at the final days when your mighty trumpet summons the dwarrow to rebuild Arda once more. But please, I beg you, let him know peace.”

Mahal, to his great credit, heard Thorin’s words as the genuine pleas that they were, and a good long while was spent as he gave them silent deliberation. So long, in fact, that it occurred to Thorin that eternity was not an endless time, but the absence of it altogether. And indeed it may have been days or weeks, or merely moments, which his maker spent pondering his desperate appeal, though Thorin only sat silent and still as the very mountain he had once been born to rule as he waited for his answer. 

At long last, Mahal seemed to come to some sort of conclusion – and at the mere idea of his wanting them to, the doors in the distance opened wide, and revealed their secrets to Thorin. 

“I will allow you your choice, my child,” he said, “but you must first know what you leave behind.” 

At looking, Thorin did not see his waiting family, nor even a single soul, though perhaps they were only just beyond. Instead, what greeted his hungry eyes was an endless expanse of gold – so far beyond measure, sorrow, and grief that the very idea of them might well be banished from his mind forever were he to allow himself entrance into the Halls of Waiting. And he knew at once that the pull of gold that all dwarrow felt was only the slightest and most enticing memory of their rightful home, which he now looked upon in its endless and uncountable glory. 

He could enter into it now, if he wished. 

He could pass through its doors, and leave the past where it was, and the future unchanged. 

“You are changed, Thorin.” 

A pair of heartbroken hazel eyes passed unbidden into his mind. 

“The dwarf I met in Bag End would never have gone back on his word! Would never have doubted the loyalty of his kin!” 

A voice without source shook as it pierced his heart, yet it was firm and unwavering in its conviction. 

“Do not speak to me of loyalty,” he now recalled having once said, as if he were not addressing the single creature who had shown him greater devotion and concern than any before him. It had not been enough to wrench him from his madness then, but now the mere memory of it arrived with such force that it caused him to stumble falteringly back, and he turned from the sight of lifeless gold with a feeling of horror and self-contempt the likes of which even he had never known. 

“I understand,” said Thorin at last, after a brief moment in which he collected himself. “I understand what I leave, and I do so willingly. I choose him.” 

Mahal, surprisingly, looked rather pleased at his answer. 

“You have chosen a much harder path, my child, and I will not be able to see you through it,” he said. “But you have shown greater strength than you yet know, and I will be glad to welcome your return once more, whenever it may come.” 

“I am not damned?” asked Thorin, his thoughts still muddled by the dregs of a dark and depthless longing, and now watered through with no small amount of confusion as well. 

“No, not damned,” replied Mahal, and he seemed a touch amused by the inquiry, as if it were not rather an important question. “You face no eternal darkness, but rather the pale light of life, which is far greater a challenge. Go now with my blessing, and take care not to make pittance of such a gift.” 

And so Thorin had. And he did, again, as he woke from his dream, slightly surprised to find that he was back in Lake-town, and not banished once more to the start of his journey as he had subconsciously feared. Still, as he parted the warm golden void that greets every traveler as they return from sleep – and was for a moment able to enjoy the singular moments shortly after waking when reality was not entirely upon him, and there was nothing in his head beyond the vague idea that off in the distance the day ahead of him loomed – he found that this time the knowledge of his divine contract lingered, and so too did the terrible fear he had felt for the fate of his one and only love. 

****** 

A great poet amongst the hobbits had once written that ‘nothing would do but moderation in all things’, and most of their race had thereafter taken it as a firm rule, to be applied to everything but the construction of sandwiches. Bilbo, more specifically, had always felt it was among the wisest of their aphorisms – given that it was long enough to mean something, but still short enough to be cross-stitched onto a decorative pillow. It was for this very reason, however, that he quickly reaffirmed his initial instinct that he did not like the Master of Lake-town one tiny bit, not one tiny bit at all. 

They had been welcomed into the humble little town quite well enough, all told, and even the churning waters of the half-frozen lake below it had only seemed to call out in greeting by bouncing rays of soft morning light upon their small and battered envoy. Indeed, the clouds themselves had parted quite accommodatingly, and in the distance the proud figure of the Lonely Mountain loomed. Even Bilbo – who feared their arrival upon it as much as he had ever feared anything at all – could not help but be enchanted by the way its jutting ridges seemed to tuck small pockets of shadow safely away from the rising autumn sun. There was little about the day which could not be considered perfectly splendid, especially as they trod on ever nearer to the first promise of a proper meal to be had in ages, and yet despite this Bilbo only marched forward into the future with an unavoidable sense of dread. 

Thorin had noticed this, it seemed, but his kind and unexpected attempts to cheer Bilbo up had only caused the hobbit further dismay – for he would very much like to know just how it was that he should only receive the king’s companionship now, when he was on the very doorstep of their bitter parting. Still, it would not do to wallow in such things, he had begrudgingly realized, and it especially would not do when such childish behavior would only prevent him from enjoying the small moments of happiness he was to be allowed with the silly dwarf he so desperately loved. And so as they had carried on into Lake-town that morning, he had done so at the side of Thorin, and often with a smile to be shared between them as they discussed this or that subject of positively no importance at all. 

But all roads in Lake-town lead to the Master’s house, it had been said – and though Bilbo thought that it was likely the Men who resided there would be more skilled in their crafting of proverbs were they not so miserable and hungry all the time (for there were no roads in Lake-town at all, and indeed there were hardly even walkways) he was still bitterly unhappy to find that the sentiment held therein was hardly wrong. It was therefore no later than mid-morning when they arrived upon the ugly old fellow’s doorstep, accompanied by a handful of thoroughly inexpert guards, and followed close behind by a parade of nosy locals and over-excited children. 

“Follow me then,” said one of their armed escort – though he was denoted as their captain more clearly by the plumage upon his helm than from any sense of leadership or competence he might have carried. But follow him they did, for they could do little else, and swiftly were they accompanied away from the hustle and bustle of the awakening marketplace, and into the still and sterile hallways of a building that had surely once been grand. 

Bilbo had hardly the time to wrinkle his nose at the smell of rot and damp that wafted beneath the many vases of days-old decaying flowers which had clearly hoped to cover it, before they arrived upon a pompously-scaled set of doors, where surely they were expected to await their invitation to treat with the Master. Thorin, however, was as dedicated to diplomacy as he ever had been, and as a result simply barged through them without so much as a knock, and announced himself with no more precursor than the distant and put-upon groan of Balin from the rear of their party. 

“I am Thorin, son of Thráin, son of Thrór, King under the Mountain,” he announced, his proud voice filling the room with a rich confidence which made all the illusory trappings of its resident’s own imagined significance seem to shrink in comparison. “I have returned to reclaim my rightful home, may all that stands in my way perish or part.” 

For a moment, there was a great stillness throughout the many gathered people whose impending feast they had so dramatically interrupted, and Bilbo – knowing they were there – watched with considerable amusement as a small group of visiting elves who were sat in the far corner of the room shot to their feet in twice as much shock as the rest. 

The Master, for his part, did not move at all from where he was rather comfortably settled in an enormous wooden chair (which for all intents and purposes seemed to be his own approximation of a throne, despite his lacking in any claim to royalty). 

“Thorin Thráinson you may claim to be, but how are we to take you on your word?” he demanded, his beady eyes darting shrewdly behind jowlish cheeks which were both ruddy and pale, and his visage altogether gave the rather accurate impression that he was an extremely disagreeable sort. “We do not know you. Are there any present who might attest to your character?” 

They of course did not know Bilbo either, but this occurred to him just as little as it had the first time such a demand had been made, and he jumped to answer it just as readily. 

“I will vouch for him,” he declared, and he stepped forward to face the crowd before him with as much boldness as he could feign on an empty stomach. “I have travelled far in my many days, farther than any hobbit you will ever meet – though you are likely never to meet another. And I have met none who can match Thorin Oakenshield in honor. He has seen us through great peril, and I have the utmost faith that he may yet face dangers unknown, and will never lose my trust.” 

It was not exactly the same speech he had given before, for he could not bring himself to so plainly lie about a future he so greatly feared. But it seemed to do the trick regardless, for the room erupted with cheers, and wonderful cries of enthusiasm – and Thorin himself only stared at him with a softness he had so sorely missed the sight of, and did not look away until long after his gaze had become impolite. 

The elves had protested the idea that their allies might harbor such stowaways from their king’s dungeons, of course – but the Master had only to hear his own people’s excited singing at the confirmation that the Lord of Silver Fountains, King of Carven Stone had at last returned to drench the valley in the prosperity it had once known, before the matter was quickly settled. He cared little for the well-being of his people, truth be told, beyond the idea that they continued to be a vague mass of people who were well enough that he might consider them his. But he was not so brave as to refuse them entirely when they were thus so inspired, and the idea that he too might profit from this dwarven venture was certainly a very moving one. 

So it was that within the span of no more than ten minutes their company had been sent away to make themselves quite as comfortable as they liked in the lodgings generously provided to them, and Bilbo, Thorin, and Fili were admitted to join the meal they had so rudely interrupted, though it had not yet been laid out. 

“Well then,” cried Bilbo, “where is this feast we were promised?” For he could live a lifetime and a half of more stress and misery than most of his kind had ever experienced before, and indeed he could endure years upon years of fretful loneliness after the death of the only one he had ever loved, but to be sat at a table without a plate being quickly placed before him was more than could be borne.

Thorin, the horrible sod, had the audacity to smile with unfettered amusement at his unhappiness, and Bilbo was appalled to realize that he might have forgotten about the mealtime entirely in the face of such kindly warmth were his growling stomach not a startling reminder of his proper hobbit-ish priorities. 

Still, the king must have heard his complaints with some seriousness, for upon being handed the first plate of the meal he only set it in front of Bilbo, and reached his hand out expectantly for another. This confused the servant who was tasked with providing them enormously, but Bilbo could hardly muster an interest in being anything other than grateful when a large slab of roast, dripping its juices invitingly onto the mashed potatoes beneath it, was within his sight. 

And as the days went on, they were only ever similarly treated by the Master, which was – in the end – exactly why Bilbo did not like him. The hobbit had hardly found the time to speak more than a word or two to Thorin, and none at all to Fili, when they had been treated to their first feast – dedicated as he was to relishing in the luxury of a proper meal with all its courses. But it quickly became clear that this initial feast was merely one of many, and indeed the Master continued to insist upon confronting them with his extravagance in a way that felt twice as boastful as it was welcoming. It was rude, to say the least, but not nearly so rude to them as it was to the many of his people who starved at his doorstep, and were sent away with naught more than a swift kick to their empty stomachs. At seeing this, Bilbo had begun to stow away some of the food in his napkins to give to whomever he might encounter on his walk back to their lodgings – though when Thorin had once caught him as he slipped a tart or two into his waistcoat, the dwarf had merely teased him about wanting leftovers, and Bilbo had allowed him to think as much. 

Their time in Esgaroth was not as restful as once it had been, however, for though Bilbo was not so drearily ill this time around, he was instead tasked with the unfortunate moral obligation to do what was right. Thus he was forced to take his leave from a particularly slow afternoon, with the dwarves all playing some odd party game he could not get the hang of, and instead slip on his ring and venture into the wild and twisting walkways of Lake-town on his own. 

The paths were deeply confusing – and often it seemed that when a certain way was condemned by becoming too sunken to pass over, or too rotten to risk, it was not marked as being dangerous at all, and was only ever built over or abandoned. He was therefore obligated to be very careful with his every step, for even the sturdiest of their passages were slick with an ever-present ice and the innards of fish, and the idea of being drowned and left invisible and undiscovered on some distant shore was a thoroughly terrifying one. 

Regardless, he made his way to the home of Bard the Bowman safely enough, and at noticing that the cloudy windows were alight with a flickering warmth he knocked with a confidence he did not feel, and braced himself for the conversation that must follow. 

It was Bard himself who answered, his grim face drawn taught with suspicion, and only growing equally so at seeing no one upon his doorstep. 

“Who goes there?” he demanded, “Show yourself at once, your tricks are not welcome here.” 

“Oh, right, sorry,” Bilbo apologized, having forgotten to remove his ring in all his nervousness, and when he did so and revealed himself to Bard the man’s suspicion was very little abated. “My name is Bilbo Baggins,” he said, “and though I am a hobbit, I have journeyed here with the company of Thorin Oakenshield. I have news for you, and you alone, if you will permit me to deliver it.” 

Bard stared at him with unmasked misgiving for a moment, before he merely nodded and raised the arm he had braced against his door ever-so-slightly, to allow his little visitor through. 

His home was comfortable, if exceedingly plain, and Bilbo considered it to easily be twice as spectacular as the Master’s for this very reason. He commented as much to his host, but his niceties were met with little but a grunt in affirmation, and he quickly dropped the topic for both their sakes. 

“If you travel with Thorin Oakenshield as you say,” Bard began, “then why is it you claim to have any message for me?” 

“I bring bad tidings, I’m afraid,” Bilbo said nervously. “I cannot tell you how I know this, or just exactly why, but there are dark events which lie ahead of us, in which you must play a central part.” 

Bard nodded, though he did not look particularly surprised at the revelation, and he only gestured shortly for Bilbo to have a seat at his table before they continued. 

“Well,” Bilbo continued, feeling enormously uncertain of just how it was he ought to deliver such news, which he himself could scarcely believe. “That is… The dragon is not dead, and in fact it will be woken soon. I regret to tell you that it will be my fault, in deed, though were it up to me I’d have the whole lot of us turn round and forget this ridiculous venture. Still, a… a good friend of mine, whose opinion I thoroughly respect, told me recently that while the future is a formidable foe, it must be met, and I rather think he’s right. And so it is that I must tell you that it is you who will slay the dragon, and my hope is that in warning you of how it can be done, we might avoid a great deal of unnecessary suffering and death.” 

Bard, still, did not react overmuch – and indeed scarcely blinked, in a way that Bilbo assumed must come by nature of his years of experience with a bow, though this understanding did not make the effect of it any less unnerving. 

“Right…” he continued, now thoroughly uncomfortable. “Right… Well, here it is, I suppose. And again, you must not ask me how I know this, but… there is a chink in his armor, just in the hollow of his left breast, and you have only to pierce him there with a single arrow to do the job… I’m sorry, are you quite alright?” he demanded, for the lack of shock with which his revelation was greeted was becoming thoroughly unnerving. 

“Perfectly, little hobbit, I thank you,” said Bard, bitterly. “As perfectly as I can be in the face of certain wroth and ruin.” 

“It’s just that you seem hardly surprised,” Bilbo said, though in truth it was more a question than a statement. 

“And if I tell you that I am not?” said Bard, in what was more a statement than a question. 

“Well, then, I suppose I will be surprised for the both of us,” said Bilbo. “Only, I happen to know you better than you know me, though once more I will provide no explanation for this, and I must admit I do not understand your reaction at all.” 

This, at least, seemed to be somewhat of interest to the bowman, and he examined Bilbo shrewdly at hearing it. 

“I believe it is my turn to tell you that I cannot reveal how it is that I know what I do, nor the extent of it,” the man replied at long last. “Only that I have received warnings for the future before the ones you now bring me, and in either case they have done little but tempt me to lose my hope for it.” 

Was it Gandalf? Bilbo wondered. Only, he did not think – as Radagast had suggested – that the extent of his predicament was yet known to his friend, and if the meddling old wizard were near enough to be giving any warnings to anyone, he would most certainly make himself known so that he might stick his wrinkled old nose in Bilbo’s own business besides. 

Still, Bard was twice as honorable as any man he had ever met, and Bilbo knew perfectly well that he was not likely to receive any secrets from him no matter how he pried. So instead he focused on a different point altogether. 

“You must not lose hope,” he insisted, “not when you alone are the very hope of Lake-town itself. I cannot reveal much, as I have said, but surely you must understand that to restore Erebor is to restore Dale, and there is yet a bright future beyond these close and dismal clouds which obscure it.”

But Bard merely shook his head, and did not seem swayed by his reasoning. 

“They are not clouds, Master Hobbit, they are great plumes of dragon-fire. I admire your view of things, but I myself have often found hope to be hollow.”

“Not so!” Bilbo cried, for he felt very strongly on this point. “Cynicism is cheap, and easy to come by, and is often sold in bulk. But hope is a delicate thing, and is likely to fade if you don’t give it the proper attention. Even so, it will carry you through the darkest of times, if only you trust it enough to lean on it a little.” 

At this Bard gave little reaction, but he no longer insisted on the bleakness of the future, and Bilbo decided to count that for something. 

“I will give you a signal,” the hobbit continued. “When I am to enter into the depths of Erebor, and the dragon will soon be woken, I will first send a thrush to whisper a warning to you. I regret that I can do little more, and I will continue to think on the matter in the hope that perhaps some other solution will come to me. But I am only a little hobbit, after all, and I cannot imagine what I could do.” 

“And I am just a bowman,” Bard sighed, “but our clipped wings seem to matter little, when we are caged by fate.” 

******* 

Thorin pinched the stems he held in his hands delicately, for he was dreadfully afraid that were he to allow his mind to wander from them for even for a moment he might crush them entirely in his clumsy grasp. Carefully, and with a nervousness entirely disproportionate to the task at hand, he crept along the creaking wooden hallway that divided their lodgings, and pushed open the door to the hobbit’s private quarters. 

Just as he had hoped, the room was empty – though he noted that the bed was rather neatly made, with the pillows fluffed just so, despite how very unlikely it was that there might be anyone who would be suitably impressed by Bilbo’s fastidious dedication to maintaining his manners anywhere on this side of the Misty Mountains. Still, it was enormously endearing, Thorin thought, and he smiled a bit just to see it. 

Quickly, for fear he would be caught – though he knew quite well that Bilbo and Bombur had gone off to the market together, and between the two of them they were likely to spend days at a time on such a mission if they went unretrieved – Thorin arranged the flowers he had picked with a truly unskilled instinct, and placed them carefully upon Bilbo’s pillow. 

They were daisies – or at least, he thought they were, though all flowers seemed much the same to him. Still, they were the same general shape and color as the ones Bilbo had once pointed out to Ori on the road, remarking that he had always considered them to be the friendliest sort of flower, and so when Thorin had seen them growing in a windowbox as he wandered through the town he could not stop himself from stealing them. Bilbo would not like that particular detail in the least, he knew, but he would rather his love not know from whom the flowers had come at all, never mind how he had gotten them. 

It was a very odd position in which he now found himself, and he gave the matter a great deal of thought as he retreated down the narrow stairway of the little house they had been lent, and claimed a comfortable armchair by the fire so that he might smoke his pipe and lose himself to his thoughts entirely. Just weeks ago, he had been determined to keep Bilbo at as great a distance as he could manage, for fear that their closeness would only hurt the hobbit. Then, of course, he had thought his little friend dead, and any idea of his One being kept safe by their separation was banished from his mind with horrible ferocity. He still did not know quite how it was that Bilbo had managed to survive such a terrible fall, nor how he had crept unseen through the dungeons of those thrice-damned elves, yet somehow or another he had managed it. Such was his nature, it seemed. His burglar would do as he pleased. 

Beyond all of this, however, was the most recent revelation of his once-forgotten purpose in returning to this earth at all. He had bargained against his own soul for the mere chance to make Bilbo happy, though he felt it was nearly beyond belief that he was to be allowed such an opportunity. And he hardly dared to wonder what grim future – for which he was wholly unprepared – might lay in store for the two of them, nor what foe he must fell to protect his little heart. 

But he was, at least, enormously gladdened to recall that he had fought the terrible temptation of gold to earn his right to do so, and this gave him some small hope that upon entering his homeland he would not be lost to it. To succumb once more to the grip of the dragonsickness had been his greatest fear, and what he had hoped to protect Bilbo from at the start. And knowing, as he did, that he was a wretched and thoroughly flawed sort of dwarrow, he had never before considered to imagine that he might ever have the strength to fight it. 

Indeed, surprising though it was, it seemed instead that what he could now fight no longer was his temptation to be near Bilbo, and to dedicate the entirety of any conversation between them to the idea of making his hobbit smile. All of this put together was nearly enough to tempt to him to confide in Bilbo – for surely, though they were not quite as close as once they had been, his friend was still as wise and as helpful as ever, and his input on the situation may be invaluable. He did not know whether he could present the subject to his friend without making the depth of his feelings clear, nor did he know whether he might have the smallest chance of their being accepted were he to betray himself. But without meaning to, he had allowed hope to reign free over his troubled heart, and thus he had begun to wish for and dream of things he had never permitted himself before. 

Before he could give the idea much further consideration, however, he looked up from the crackling fire in the hearth, and realized that the eternal occupant of his thoughts had manifested himself in front of him with a rather amused-looking grin. 

“Well, if you’re not going to accept my offer, I suppose I’ll be forced to eat them all myself,” Bilbo said, and it was clear from the twinkle in his wonderfully bright eyes that he knew well enough that Thorin had no idea what he was talking about, and only meant to make the dwarf’s life unnecessarily difficult. 

“If your offer was one of vegetables, or indeed a plant of any sort, then feel free to avail yourself,” Thorin said, doing his best to remain solemn in tone (for he knew how much Bilbo enjoyed it when he said ridiculous things in a stern sort of voice). “Otherwise, you will have to repeat your question, for I was regrettably rather lost to my thoughts.” 

“And what thoughts were those?” Bilbo asked, his tone making it quite clear that he was surprised to hear Thorin was capable of thinking at all. 

Thorin grunted in response. “Only the fate of the world and the whims of the Valar. Nothing which might concern a hobbit, I’m sure. Now then, what was your question?” 

“Well, well,” said Bilbo, taking a seat on the armchair opposite him and stretching out his toes to warm them by the fire, “I am glad to hear it was nothing of great importance. Far more pressing is the fact that I have purchased some lovely gingersnap cookies, and I was going to offer you the chance to have a few in exchange for a sample or two of your horrible dwarven pipe-weed, but I’m afraid the offer is no longer available to you.” 

“Whyever not?” demanded Thorin. “What must I now do to earn a share of your treasure? Name your price, you conniving creature, and I will see it done.” 

Bilbo sighed rather comfortably, as at last he found himself the perfect position to relax in the enormous chair upon which he sat, and he removed a brown paper sack from his waistcoat pocket, and began to munch on one of the treats in question with feigned contemplation. 

“Well then, let me see…” he mused. “I want for very little in this world at the moment, for I managed to find some handkerchiefs at the market as well. So I think you have nothing with which to tempt me, and I am quite content.” 

Thorin puffed away at his pipe, furrowing his brow in a mimicry of his own very deep thoughts on the matter. “Certainly there is something a king among the dwarrow may offer to tempt you Shire-folk,” he insisted. “Perhaps an extravagant tea set, or a set of pots and pans of solid gold? I am certain both can be found within my mountain, and surely to retrieve them from beneath a sleeping dragon will be the work of a moment.” 

“Ha!” laughed Bilbo, munching away at another cookie and caring little about the crumbs in his lap, in a way that made Thorin realize how subtly dwarfish his friend had become. “Shows what you know, you fool. Hobbits only need one nice tea set, for pretending with company that they never use anything else. And pots and pans of gold could hardly be practical, no matter how jealous I might make my relatives with them. No,” he decided at last, “I think I will be forced to settle for some terrible pipeweed and a good story.” 

Thorin nodded solemnly. “Then we have a deal. I regret that I do not have a contract to the effect on hand, but I doubt whether I could have one drawn up in time to avoid your devouring your side of the bargain entirely. I suppose I must instead trust your word in the matter. Here,” and he passed over his pipe to Bilbo, taking care not to betray himself and drop the dratted thing entirely as their fingers brushed casually in the exchange, “you may have the first part of your payment, though you will need to guide me toward the second.” 

Bilbo puffed away very happily at the pipe, folding his arms contentedly over his stomach, and Thorin was forced to look once more to the fire so that he did not begin to stare. 

“Hmm,” the hobbit said ponderously. “I’m afraid I had not thought that far. Give me a moment, and I will think on it.” 

“Give me my payment, and I will allow you your moment,” Thorin responded, and though – in truth – he had never been a great fan of gingersnaps, he received them gratefully, and doubted whether he had tasted anything sweeter. 

“I am glad to see you looking so greatly improved,” Bilbo said, and his teasing tone was now lost in favor of one so genuine Thorin half suspected he hadn’t meant to speak aloud at all. “Sorry, I meant nothing by that. Only, you looked truly dreadful when I found you in the dungeons, and you seemed rather miserable. Not that I fault you, of course. It was truly wicked of Thranduil to have banished you so far below the ground. And, that is, I don’t mean to say that…” 

Thorin raised his hand comfortingly, before Bilbo could make himself flustered where he needn’t be. “Peace, my friend. You are right, I was not at my best in the dungeons, and I am very grateful that you appeared, as you always have, to rescue me from the darkest of places.” 

“Oh, well,” Bilbo said with a blush, “it was really no bother.” 

And Thorin could only laugh a bit at hearing it, for it was a statement of such potent mistruth and genuine intention that only a hobbit could have managed it. Or, perhaps, only Bilbo. 

“Do you….” Bilbo began, seeming suddenly nervous, though Thorin could not imagine why. “Would you mind… That is, the mention of those dungeons has reminded me of a conversation we had in their depths, and I was wondering… Could you tell me a bit more about dwarves and their Ones?” 

Thorin frowned, and gestured for the pipe once more, now truly wishing to give thought to his words where once he had only been pretending. 

“Oh dear,” Bilbo began to fret, “I don’t mean to pry, I hope that isn’t some sort of inappropriate subject. I was only curious, we can speak of something else if you’d like. Perhaps the weather?” 

“Do not concern yourself, Bilbo,” Thorin reassured, “I only wished to devote some consideration to the topic so I could answer you properly. What is it you wish to know?” 

“Well,” Bilbo began, “Fili and Kili once told me about the general idea, and it seems to be on everyone’s minds lately, for more than once in the last week has the matter been mentioned to me by some member of our group or another… As I understand it, some dwarves are made by Mahal to be one half of a whole, yes?” 

“Yes,” Thorin nodded. 

“And dwarves will hardly consider the idea of romance if it is not so predestined, will they?” 

“No,” Thorin confirmed, “we will not.” 

“Hmm,” Bilbo considered this with an unreadable expression. “And I suppose your One must be made by Mahal, then? You can only fall in love with another dwarf?” 

Thorin pondered the question, though he knew his own answer well enough. “I could never imagine that I might understand the whims of my maker in their entirety,” he said at last, “but no, I do not believe that to be the case. From a purely academic standpoint, it may stand to reason well enough, yet I know that it is not true.” 

“How?” asked Bilbo. 

“I simply do,” Thorin insisted, averting his eyes, “I can offer no more explanation than that.” 

Bilbo fell silent for a while, clearly giving thorough consideration to some point of their conversation. Thorin dreaded to fathom why – for painfully aware though he was that his hobbit’s heart was irrevocably spoken for, a small part of him still jealously suspected his friend’s intentions in wondering at the emotional availability of their companions. 

“And have you got one, then?” Bilbo asked, his voice parting the silence suddenly, and his unexpected question gripped at Thorin’s heart. “Only if it’s an appropriate question, mind. Like I said, I don’t mean to pry.” 

Thorin nodded silently for a moment, before he could work up the courage to speak. “I have,” he said, half whispering, and only then did he notice how the darkness had grown silently around them. 

“And have you ever met them? Or is that not something you’d know right away…”

“I have. It is not,” Thorin responded. “I encountered him once, a long time ago, and I did not recognize him. I made a fool of myself, and mistreated him for nearly the entirety of our time together. He deserved far better than me, and still does. I met him again, a second time, and then he did not recognize me. Perhaps he is the better for it.”

The fire in the hearth before them crackled and sputtered as it began to die – and for a moment there was no sound between them beyond the shifting of ash where once logs had lay, and no light beyond the final red refrains of flames that were now only embers, and the glow of the little pipe they once more passed between them. 

“I doubt that, Thorin,” Bilbo said softly after a long while, and he looked truly saddened in the face of his friend’s dismay. “I doubt that very much indeed.”


	15. Chapter 15

The morning of their departure toward the Lonely Mountain dawned bright and early, if for no other reason than that Bilbo had not managed to discover a way to prevent it from doing so. Nonetheless, the sun had arrived with it, shrouded in a great cloak of misty clouds that cast off ceaseless sprinklings of rain – rather giving the impression that it, too, was a tad reluctant to watch their impending fate, and preferred to do so with one eye covered. 

Their group breakfasted in silence, seeming to agree that it was far too early for anything of importance to be said, nor for anything of unimportance to occur to them at all. And it was whilst carrying the weight of this very silence that they collected their scattered belongings from the humble lodgings they had made themselves so comfortable in, and departed at last from the dismal docks of the Lake-town, to nary a sound but the distant calls of wakening birds. 

The cold autumn wind assaulted them unforgivingly as their boats drifted at an almost mournful pace ever closer to the shores beyond, and its cruel and calloused fingers pricked tears into Bilbo’s eyes, and battered his poor cheeks pink. Indeed, it did not take too dreadfully long before he abandoned any hope for his pride which he might have awoken with not an hour earlier, and he tucked himself up to his nose in the ratty remnants of what had once been a rather splendid shirt. Even so, as they continued onward – and the chill began to prance, now truly unimpeded, across the open water surrounding them, where it caused the glass-like surface they had become familiar with to shatter into millions of ominous ripples – his discomfort only became more pronounced. And indeed, it was not very much longer than that when he abandoned his dignity as well, and leaned in as close as he dared to Thorin’s side, where the brunt of the gale could not reach him. 

Thorin, luckily, did not seem to mind overmuch, and in fact he made no comment other than to engage Bofur in a murmured conversation about woodcarving, of all things, which Bilbo was certain he’d never taken an interest in before. Truthfully, it was all rather boring, and before he knew it he was mortified to find that he was being shaken awake. Thereupon he discovered that not only had he managed to unconsciously avail himself of the King of Erebor’s rather comfortable fur-cloaked shoulder (which he could only hope against hope he had not drooled on), but that the same king had neither gently nor roughly pushed him away – as would have been well within his rights and character – and neither had any of the hobbit’s supposed friends attempted to prevent him from certain embarrassment by subtly waking him in the entirety of what was an hour’s ride at least. 

Too embarrassed even to apologize, Bilbo hardly managed to stumble gracelessly from the boat in one piece – and thus he nearly missed the aggravating looks of amusement being cast at him from all directions, with as fascinating a sight as he currently found the ground. In truth, it did hurt him, a bit, to realize that his fruitless infatuation with their leader was such a source of amusement to the dwarrow he considered his dear companions. Though he could admit it made him act like quite a fool on occasion, he still could not imagine why it was that his impending heartbreak was so delightfully entertaining to their lot. Thorin, at least, seemed entirely uninterested in his behavior, and only studied his map with an air of enormous concentration, as if in hope that even after a journey’s-worth of ponderance and examination there may yet be secrets hidden upon it that he had not yet discovered. He was certainly a thorough dwarf, which was a trait much to be admired.

Even Balin, whose demeanor was always steadfast and decorous, only winked when Bilbo met his eye, and the hobbit felt he could not possibly be made to be more embarrassed if he was given a Highday night and plenty of rich West Farthing ale to do it. He dratted himself for being so obvious, and nearly wished he could force himself to forget all about the endless and unyielding impulses of love. Still, the longing he felt for the ridiculous dwarven king who had long ago claimed an unreasonable amount of space in his heart was revealing itself to be rather like a tin of sweets locked behind a kitchen cupboard - it occupied his mind endlessly, and would continue to do so until it was found to be truly empty. And until such time as he was brave enough to discover what he already knew, with regards to his romantic prospects, he would instead be forced to give himself over to further foolishness. 

So resigned – and rather eager to avoid the far-less-subtle suggestions of the rest of his companions (and Fili and Kili in particular, whose inscrutable antics had bothered even their oblivious uncle enough to cause him to abandon his map and begin to examine the sparsely-scattered sycamores that lined the edge of the Desolation for some unknown treasure) – Bilbo pulled out his little book, and leafed through the well-worn and tattered papers held within until he found his notes for their current predicament. Its previous pages were rather filled with an embarrassing amount of anxious scribblings and frustrated scratchings, which served to well document that a good number of his plans had not gone at all the way he might have hoped. 

But they had all arrived upon the foot of the mountain roughly when they were meant to, he supposed, and in one piece besides. Surely there was certainly something to be said for that. Even so, he scarcely resisted the urge to rip the section full of his ideas for avoiding the halls of the Elvenking from the book entirely, and instead slashed through them with a rather vindictive X, before turning his attention to the pages that followed. 

1\. Arrive at Esgaroth, avoid being imprisoned, eat a proper meal if at all possible 

They had done that, at least, thank Yavanna (and her husband for good measure). 

2\. Seek out Bard, warn him of what is to come 

That, too, he had accomplished, although the manner in which their interaction had panned out was still enormously confusing to Bilbo, and though he had hardly the time to do so he could not help but ponder the meaning of it… 

Unfortunately, it was the tasks that followed which promised to be among the most difficult he had yet faced (though one admittedly more-so than the other): 

3\. Ensure the company finds the side-door, avoid being obvious if at all possible (thickheaded lot)  
4\. Treat with Smaug, try to avoid destruction (must give this further thought) 

He had hoped, rather foolishly, that he might somehow concoct an enormously clever solution to the rather significant problem that was the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities, which yet slumbered mere miles of soil and stone away from them. But at reaching his thirteenth-and-first birthday all that time ago – and at finding himself, even then, to be weighed down with the guilt of the misfortune he had wrought upon the people of the lake – he had still never managed to conjure up any semblance of an idea as to how it might have been avoided, save for his occasional fantasy of giving his company (and their leader in particular) a rather thorough and well-scripted talking to, and convincing them all to depart once more to the safety of the Shire, where they would be welcome to stay for as long as they pleased (as long as they were good about the tidying up, and didn’t bother the neighbors overmuch). 

At being presented the opportunity to enact this silly daydream of his, however, Bilbo knew quite as well in the present as he had in the past that to do so would accomplish little. Even were he to summon the correct words to express his sentiments – and indeed were he to put them the proper order, and to deliver them with an appropriately rousing enthusiasm – he was hardly under the scarcest impression that he might have the faintest idea of how to redirect the guiding hand of Fate when it seemed so insistent on their current course. One would think, upon having met one’s maker – and even at seeming to have been granted from them quite an enormous favor – that their divine wishes would thence not be quite so terribly obscured, but if anything Bilbo felt doubly clueless as to the relative wisdom of his decisions at any given moment, and triply ill-at-ease with the consequences of even his most well-intentioned blunders. 

And far beyond that, he felt quite strongly that the stubbornness of Fate was nothing to the stubbornness of dwarves, and that the legendary stubbornness of dwarves paled at the singular stubbornness of Thorin Oakenshield. For good or ill, what the king wished would only ever be done. 

Realizing that there was nothing for it, Bilbo lit his pipe, and did his best to puff away at it with a doggedly determined effort toward meditative peace, while steadfastly ignoring the similarity between his own meager exhalations and the great plumes of smoke that churned in unbroken streams from the gates of the distant mountain, where they rose higher and higher until they mingled and disappeared amongst the gathered clouds. 

It was an enormous clap of thunder that finally broke his reverie in full, and though to Bilbo the sound was a rather ominous one, it was greeted with a great cheer of delight from the rest of his companions. 

“Mahal swings his mighty hammer,” they cried, now blessedly distracted from their japing and jibery, “he crafts the future of Erebor even now!”

The hobbit smiled indulgently at their superstition – for he knew, as any reasonable person did, that thunder in the morning only heralded an unexpected visitor by nightfall, and that a singular clap so early in the autumn meant nothing more than plenty of crops come spring. But he shared an amused glance with Thorin, who seemed to have found whatever he was looking for amongst the trees and had come to join him with his own pipe in hand. 

And so they waited a moment in the cold light of morning – though there was still a distance yet to walk before they reached the mountain they had traveled so far to reclaim. And each in their own way, they reveled in their good fortune, and the blessing of hope which had once seemed so distant from them. 

And in their joy, none noticed the black rider that lurked silently at the edge of the forest far beyond them, nor did they remark upon the eerie and obedient stillness of his dark horse as his shadowed gaze loomed unbroken over their merrymaking. 

***** 

It took them no more than a half-day of scrambling over loose rocks and the rotting remnants of charred trees before at last they reached the very foothills of the Lonely Mountain, and upon doing so Thorin felt an enormous burden of dread fall upon his heart, the likes of which he had never known before. He had a great many causes for regret in his life, and indeed he was no stranger to the sensation of awaiting an impending battle from which there was little hope of emerging – victorious or otherwise. But the singular enormity of this place, and the significance of the memories that circled him like scavenging birds at the very sight it – good and bad, recent and near-faded – was enough to cause his dreary footsteps to falter, and nearly enough to convince him to beg that they forget their adventure and abandon the many perils that yet awaited them. 

A small part of him even resented this foreknowledge, though he knew it to be a consecrated blessing. Once, and in fact not so very long ago, he had arrived at these same stony steps and looked upon them with nothing but the pride of homecoming. It had nearly blinded him, and made him all but unaware of the risks he would so easily ask all those around him to assume in his quest to lay claim to it. Now, though, the great carven bridge leading to the once-proud entrance of Erebor was not merely the place upon which he had so long ago sat with his sister and brother, as they had celebrated the anniversary of their grandfather’s crowning with a stolen cask of ale shared between them. It was, too, the place upon which he had threatened to dash the body of Bilbo Baggins over the ill-advised but well-intentioned theft of a piece of lifeless stone. The door they now sought was not only their source of entry into the long-darkened halls he had once called home, it was the same one that would swallow his hobbit whole as he ventured deep into the very heart of the mountain, entirely alone, to confront the very creature who had once haunted Thorin’s dreams. And the vast and uncountable riches which still laid secure in this vault of frigid granite – surely lit by the accursed glow of that wyrm’s eternal flame – were not only a symbol of salvation for his people, but harkened the emergence of his most dreadful weakness. 

Indeed, the treasures of his home felt almost to taunt him, separated though they were by miles of raw marble and a vast expanse of well-fraught hours. 

“You have not fallen yet,” they whispered from afar, “but you will. Weak dwarf that you are, surely you must know that none of the good which you are graced to know the presence of was ever truly meant for you. Even the heart of your One was crafted for another. Yours is a hollow fate, to be filled only with unfeeling gold. Come closer,” they begged, “come closer. Claim it for your own.” 

It disgusted him quite entirely, to hear this familiar beckoning, and in fact he may very nearly have been sick over it, were it not for the kind and ever-timely interruption of Balin. 

“I suggest we halt for lunch, my king,” his friend advised, in the same unassuming tone he always took when he’d rather give Thorin the impression that any good idea formed between them had only been his own (which was, of course, the mark of a truly wise counselor). “We are all enthusiastic to reach the crest of the mountain and find entrance, to be sure, but we must not forget our needs in our haste. Especially not the needs of our smallest companions.” 

The old dwarf raised a single white eyebrow, and Thorin knew him quite well enough to understand the implication that there was something he ought to be noticing. Sure enough, when he cast his gaze over his party, the excitement of their gathered faces as they chattered amongst each other was marred by the rather unhappy frown of their hobbit, who stood at the rear of their troupe, and was muttering solemnly to Bifur. The kindly dwarf at his side was nodding – interspersing his comforting gestures with the occasional pat of the wind-tossed hair on Bilbo’s head – and Thorin frowned deeply at seeing it. Was he already losing himself to the thrall of gold, that he had not noticed his burglar’s discontent? They had not been walking close together, for there had been much to discuss by way of planning, and his little friend had seemed not to wish to hear it. But he could hardly consider himself a leader of a meager thirteen – much less an awaiting kingdom – if he was so blind to their troubles. 

Not knowing what else to do but to call upon his knowledge of hobbits as a whole, Thorin agreed to the suggestion of a meal at once, and stood beside Bombur as the dwarf rather busily – and somewhat nervously – prepared it under his watchful eye, so that he might bring his friend a bowl of stew the very moment one became available. 

They were not able to break from their journeying overlong, of course, as there was much yet to be done before the day was out (which Thorin felt he knew better than anyone, for all that he now had an advantage in understanding the location and disposition of the entrance they sought). Even so, their rest seemed to cheer Bilbo considerably, for he had the chance to sit right at the center of their gathering, and the rambunctious revelry of the dwarrow – Thorin’s ridiculous nephews, in particular – appeared only to encourage him, where once the king recalled it inspiring nothing but a vaguely irate bewilderment. 

“Do you think I’ll be the first to catch sight of our door then, burglar?” Fili asked, with a tone that rather proudly suggested there was only a single correct answer to his inquiry. 

Bilbo, naturally, merely scoffed at his confidence, rather busy as he was with his mouth now full of food. 

“You make yourself ridiculous, brother!” Kili countered excitably. “You may insist on taking pride in those swords of yours, but your eyes are weak and untrained as a result of them. As the only archer of our group, it’s natural that I will go down in legend as the one to spot it.” 

“Ah, yes,” Dwalin grunted from beside him. “Beardless Kili, they’ll sing about. As useless as an elf in a mine, but he did find a door once.” 

This earned him a rather firm kick to the thigh from a princely steel-toed boot, but the enormous warrior seemed hardly to notice it. 

“Tada salbul azafr 'azahâl inbulhibir ni thaiku, he called me!” Kili whined immediately upon noticing the ineffectiveness of his retribution. “Balin, do something about this horrible brother of yours!” 

Balin leveled one of the many unimpressed expressions for which he was so famous upon the young dwarf, making it rather clear that he took an enormous deal more interest in the pipe he was puffing away at than in any adolescent ridiculousness he might conjure up. 

“If you had paid but a single mite of attention to our lessons, young prince,” he responded, after taking his time to blow a respectably large smoke ring into the finally clearing sky, “you would know that our dwarven doors are invisible when closed, and even their masters cannot find them if they have forgotten their secrets.” 

“Aye,” said Fili, with a smug little grin, “I’ve heard the same said about dwarven hearts, come to think of it.” 

He then threw the remainder of his bread at Thorin, who – not knowing whether to reprimand him for his wastefulness with their limited food, or for his cavalier reference to the secret he most jealously guarded – instead settled upon an infuriated glare which he hoped would thoroughly communicate both. 

It seemed to do the trick, for Fili’s eyes widened, and he immediately took a rather intense interest in the bottom of his now-empty soup bowl. Bilbo, beside him, appeared somehow saddened by the exchange, and though Thorin could not fathom of why this might be he was still disheartened to note the return of any trouble to his hobbit’s disposition. 

“We must continue onward,” he said at once, rising and handing his bowl to Glóin, whose turn it was to wash them. “We haven’t any time to waste with nonsense, the last light of Durin’s Day is nigh upon us.” 

Though they were loath to continue onward, their group was mightily enthused about their destination, and it was with far lesser grumbling and gripery than was typical of them that they packed up their scant belongings, and continued onward over the abandoned and unmaintained paths to circle the enormous and solitary mountain they hoped to call home. 

It was in fact Kili, in the end, who spotted their hidden porthole – though it took him nearly the whole of the afternoon to do it. Indeed, by the time that he managed it Thorin had begun to become rather discouraged by the blindness of the company he kept, and was all but prepared to march right up to the keyhole himself and declare his own place in their legends if they took very much longer about it. But after departing for yet another investigative foray, this time with Bilbo chattering along beside him (about the relative suitability of their soil for a raspberry patch, of all things), his nephew was hardly gone from their base camp for long enough that Thorin and Bofur might finish their earlier conversation before his whooping and hollering drew the lot of them to the rocky outcropping where he and the hobbit had wandered. 

“I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” he shouted, quite loud enough to wake any dark creature from its slumber (as Bofur was quick to point out), and certainly with enough triumphant force to annoy and disappoint his brother. “It was only right here,” he continued on, hardly tempering his volume even as they all reached him, “you lot of fools must have stumbled past it thrice over at least! Oh dear, as the cleverest amongst us, I despair of you all.” 

“If he truly is the cleverest, I despair along with him,” Dwalin muttered to Thorin beside him, and though Kili seemed neither to notice his comment nor pay it any regard, Bilbo apparently heard it quite well, and shot them both a rather unimpressed look. 

Though he did not make mention of it to their group at large, Thorin rather suspected that it had been Bilbo who had truly found their hidden door – for so he had once done rather cleverly before, as the dwarf well remembered. The burglar must have led the young prince to it, however (likely by the hand, and certainly none too subtly), in a kindhearted attempt to divert any hint of glory from himself. 

But as they climbed the winding and eternally-solid steps to their point of entry, and Thorin at last had a chance to reference his theory to the hobbit more privately, his dubiosity was met only with adamant denial. Indeed, his friend seemed to take the accusation rather more seriously than it was meant, as if Thorin truly felt his very honesty might be questionable, and so the king rather wisely dropped the subject as quickly as he was able. 

Their trail going upward was often lost, but often rediscovered, and though Thorin knew the way – of course – he needed hardly to lead them through it before at last they alighted upon the crest of an outcropping of rock, where the hidden door was clearly held. To look down from where they stood was no small matter, even for a dwarf of a firm constitution and with steel in his stomach, and so the good majority of their party stayed tight to the wall of stone – upon which they readily began to beat their axes and cast their frustrated curses at its not opening itself up to them immediately – rather than face the treacherous fall that began to suggest itself to them whenever they approached the cliff’s edge. 

Bilbo, however, appeared to take little interest in their proceedings, though once before he had watched their efforts to steal into their own home with great enthusiasm and encouragement. Instead, the little hobbit only sat at the very precipice of the bluff that sheltered them, and seemed to have a far vaster regard for the great snails that slithered slimily over the cool and shaded rocks surrounding them than in the terrible fate that beckoned beneath his furry feet. In truth, this made Thorin rather nervous – for though you and I know quite well that he had hardly any right to fear the idea of his dear friend suffering the effects of a terrible fall, he was still not at all pleased by the concept, and indeed the vaguest notion of it caused his stomach to clench horribly in protest. 

“Why do you take your leave of us, Master Burglar?” he asked upon his approach, taking care that he did not startle his friend at such a time when balance was nothing short of a virtue. “Surely you have not given up on us already, there is still an hour or so of sunlight within which we might find our answer.” 

“It’s Bilbo, Thorin, as I’ve told you many times before,” replied his friend, though he did not dignify the rest of the teasing questions directed at him with more than a raised eyebrow, and instead gestured vaguely to the king that he would be welcome to sit down and abandon his looming, if he wished. 

Thorin did so at once, of course, and as he clambered a tad awkwardly to the ground he suffered a kind sort of warmth, which spread from his chest and caused his head to bow for a moment in something akin to embarrassment. The hobbit’s use of his first name affected him so, even when this was hardly the first instance of it. 

He wondered at that, for a moment, before he realized that for the longest time Bilbo had only ever called him Master Oakenshield (excepting instances of great peril, or great annoyance). This, to any other dwarf – or, indeed, to most peoples of any race – would be considered nothing more than a sign of polite deference, but Thorin was a king, after all. And though he was master of a great many things, to refer to him as such when an enormous wealth of other titles and prefixes (and appellations and epithets) were far more apt (and perhaps even more appropriate), was not a sign of respect, but merely one of distance. 

At the simple sound of such comfortable familiarity from his hobbit’s lips, though, he could not help but feel that some of that distance was almost deliberately banished. And though Thorin had always taken great pride in the strength of his name, and the noble lineage that allowed him to carry it, he rather ridiculously wished – for the briefest of moments – that it were a little longer, if only to make that feeling last. 

It was in lamenting this absence that he noticed what a dreadful silence reigned over the bald slopes of the Lonely Mountain – which had once, so long ago, been proudly described in the poetry of his people as the very green that emerald and jade must envy, and had been considered by many scholars to be an ancient gift from Yavanna to Mahal. Now, though, the forests that had once crowned the mountain were razed to the ground, and the wildlife that had once found a home within them were scattered, and lost. There was little that remained of the woods Thorin had once hunted, and what was left was bleached by ash and dust. Not a bird sang, nor elk called – and even the wind seemed to maintain a wary distance from the rising ground, so that it did not howl over the barren tundra so much as whisper in mournful warning. 

“You know, I’ve given it a good deal of thought, and I believe I’m right in my hopes that a raspberry patch would do rather splendidly here,” said Bilbo, his absent tone ill-suited to how wonderfully he had guessed the source of Thorin’s sudden onset of bleak-mindedness. “Wild raspberries, especially, if we can get them. They flourish on mountains, you know, and they’re oh-so delicious, though perhaps not as beautiful as their cultivated cousins. Still, I imagine in a year’s time I could conjure up a jam that would make me the envy of every hobbit from tip to tail of the Brandywine River... Hm, and bufalloberries would do rather well here too,” he continued rambling on, kicking his feet into the open air and paying little attention at all to his enchanted audience, “they might encourage the wildlife to return as well, come to think of it. Bears especially, but you cannot complain about that, they’re quite as important as every other creature no matter how fearsome they might be. And perhaps Beorn might visit more readily were you to have them… Anyway, did you know, my father was quite the gardener, and he once told me that raspberries can flourish at up to three thousand meters in elevation! Imagine that. I’m no judge of these things, but I think your mountain must exceed that in some small margin. Still, anything below the snowline will surely suit-”

“Satthiye mushug,” Thorin said quietly, with a smile. 

You drive me crazy. 

“Thorin, you know perfectly well I don’t understand that secret language of yours,” Bilbo scolded, though he did not seem to mind the interruption. “You must make yourself plain. What is it you wish to say to me?”

“Ma kamaharniki,” Thorin replied, and he could not look away from his friend’s face, even knitted with exasperation such as it was. 

I cannot make up my mind. 

Bilbo only rolled his eyes, very clearly communicating that he was unwilling to exert any more effort when his conversational companion insisted on being nothing but befuddling. 

“My apologies, Bilbo,” Thorin placated warmly, for he had no wish to irritate his burglar when the poor fellow had been doing his utmost to be kind. “Your wisdom on this matter is greatly appreciated, and I… we can all only hope that when our business with the dragon is said and done, you might be willing to lend your insights into the health of our land for as long as you are willing to be kept upon it.” 

“You ought not extend invitations for the future when such dark affairs stand before it,” Bilbo cautioned, now seeming rather bleak himself. “Still, when the time comes, if you remain even half so interested in my company that you might be willing to suffer it without much return, I would, of course, be delighted to stay.” 

Bilbo was right, as he was wont to be. And Thorin knew rather well that to consider the matter settled between them – when they lingered at the precipice of great tribulation and grief just as surely as they now sat upon a similar cliff that felt, in itself, to be the edge of the world – would be enormously foolish. But even so, the promise that he was right in feeling the meagerest hope that one day – far off in the future, after a great many things he could not yet imagine had come to pass – Bilbo might wish to stay, was a comfort to him, and he locked the idea of it away in his heart, determined to protect it. 

“Is it the dragon that you fear most, then?” Thorin asked, though he recognized almost of an instant that – from Bilbo’s perspective, especially – the question was rather a stupid one. 

Bilbo, though, did not make as much fun of him as he might have been right in doing, and instead only considered the question thoughtfully. 

“No,” he said. “Well, yes, of course. I would be a fool-and-a-half if I did not admit to some degree of dread about the matter. But… though I recognize that I am not so old as many of you dwarrow, and indeed those dratted wizards might consider me nothing more than a sapling, I still feel I have lived for quite long enough to know the wisdom in expecting as much peril from the promise of comfort as I do from any threats that might make themselves more plainly known.” 

He was quite justified in thinking so, but Thorin felt he had little to say on the matter that would not risk his betrayal of some level of his foreknowledge, and so he elected to avoid the subject. 

“You do not have to enter into the side-passage if you do not wish to,” he said instead, hoping that his tone was not over-familiar in his attempt to be comforting. “You have done quite enough to aid us in our quest, and indeed I am certain you’ve fulfilled the duties of your employment twice over,” he continued (and at this, Bilbo snorted, before shooting him a look that was as deeply baffled as it was unimpressed). 

“Don’t be ridiculous, Thorin,” the burglar said with a huff. “I signed my name to that confusticated contract of yours, and I will see it done. I know I am just a hobbit, but you ought to know better than to doubt me at this point. Need I remind you that it was I and no one else who rescued you from the horrible unwashed stewpot of the trolls, only to again rescue you from the dungeons of the Elvenking? And was it another hobbit who returned from the very veil of death, by your reckoning? Because I could swear that it was me, o’ king, but please do correct me if I am false.” 

“Peace, my friend,” Thorin placated, raising a hand in his defense. “I do not doubt you in the least. Indeed, I have the utmost confidence in you, in all things. I merely wished to inform you that I can ask that another be sent in your stead, though I must admit I am not certain I have the confidence of our company enough to command that it be done. But I will go in myself, if you wish it.”

Bilbo seemed somewhat appeased by his clumsy attempt at pacification, although he was still very little impressed. 

“You imagine for yourself a far lesser regard than you are actually given, you know,” he said rather firmly. “You always have. I believe every member of our group would follow you right into the mouth of the dragon, even without any suggestion on your part.”

“And you?” Thorin asked, though he had not intended to. 

Bilbo gave him a rather considering look, before returning his gaze to the slowly fading sun as it began to hide itself behind the pale and distant forests far beyond them. 

“I followed you past the edges of Bree,” he said. “That is quite nearly the same thing, for a hobbit. And I have no doubt that I would do it again, and perhaps many times more, if only you were to ask it.” 

“Would you not miss your smial, and your friends?” Thorin inquired in shock, for the priorities of the Shire-folk were well known to him, and the priorities of his friend were far further a familiarity. 

“Oh certainly,” said Bilbo, whose mind now seemed to be only half in the present. “But I do not doubt that when I return – or, that is to say, if – I will miss them just as much, in an odd sort of way… I am afraid to say that I am lonely, because to do so feels nearly to admit that I deserve it. But I am, in truth. I have been for a long while, before and after such an odd pile of dwarves as yourselves landed on my entryway.” 

“Is it…” Thorin began slowly, for he greatly feared the answer. “Is it that you miss him? Whoever he was… The one you loved, all those years ago...” 

“Yes,” said Bilbo simply. 

Thorin nodded solemnly. 

“And you are lonely still?” he asked, after the silence of a moment. “Even among such loyal friends as you have now? We are all quite devoted to you, you know.” 

Bilbo smiled warmly, and appeared to root himself once more in the present. 

“No, no, of course not,” he said. “Well yes, sometimes, and perhaps forever. But who ever lived life without some source of pain, after all? No, you dwarves, ridiculous as you are, make me very happy, and I am quite devoted to you too. Your friendship alone is a far greater gift than any simple hobbit may ever hope to deserve. Besides, it doesn’t do to search for chips in a china set when it was given freely, as my mother used to say.” 

Thorin, though not entirely certain what that might mean, nevertheless understood it to be a compliment of sorts in hobbitish terms, and he accepted it rather gratefully. 

For a moment the silence reigned over them once more, though it was not so oppressive as it had once felt, and it was broken by little but the ruckus of their friends, who continued to bash upon the unyielding stone and howl curses at the very creator who had wrought it. Thorin knew that he ought to feign some interest in discovering its secrets, of course, but he understood well enough that there would be no budging such enchanted rock until the sun that still slipped slowly from view – lending its final refrains in pink, and orange, and a deep beryl red, to a landscape which no longer looked so desolate – had departed from them entirely, and taken with it the very spells that hindered their way. Indeed, though the future of his people, and his sole path forward, was now at his back, Thorin could not help but to feel that the world was ahead, and to look upon it with Bilbo by his side was a blessing he would not so easily abandon. 

“What was it like, growing up beneath a mountain?” Bilbo inquired, at length. “Pardon my asking, only I’ve always wondered. I could not imagine a childhood so wholly different from my own.” 

Thorin thought for a moment, carefully considering his answer, for it seemed as if his friend was genuinely interested rather than merely being polite. 

“I’m sure it was rather different from the open and rolling hills of the Shire,” he responded at last, “though I was rather comfortable and happy in it. Erebor is not so dark as you might imagine, especially when lit and maintained by the people who ought to rightfully inhabit it, as I hope you will one day wish to see... Still, even the darkness can be a beautiful thing, when it serves to draw your attention to the light. There are caves far below the mountains, you know, and though I was not permitted to enter into them, I’m sure you will understand that to a child that merits little more than an invitation. I would often steal away to explore them, when my duties would allow, just to find the small sub-caverns where fireflies dwelt. They were not easy to discover, and were quickly frightened off, but were you careful about your approach you could reach forward into their midst and feel as if you were parting the stars.”

He sighed then, lost to his reverie, and the emotions that had been unearthed with its revival.

“I took my mother there once,” he continued, “for her birthday… I worried she might be angry with me at the offset, but I don’t believe I’ve ever brought anyone more joy than I did with that singular and rather unimpressive gift.” 

Thorin worried, then, that he might have given his friend rather a longer answer than he had been interested in hearing, but when he glanced over he was met only with a delighted smile, as if the mere mention of such happiness was enough to bring Bilbo some of his own. 

“That sounds wonderful,” the hobbit said, giving every impression that he truly meant it. “Perhaps we did not grow up so differently after all. Did you ever watch the stars, as I did?” 

“Oh, of course!” Thorin exclaimed happily. “When I became old enough to manage the journey, I used to climb to the highest point of the far northern watchtower. Just there, in the distance,” he said, pointing to the now-shadowed outline of a crumbling shaft of stone. “I would steal away from my guards, when I could, and go off to admire the constellations that stretched above so endlessly that even the might of Erebor seemed to be something small and manageable in comparison. Regrettably, I think this tendency of mine worried my father, for it was decidedly elvish of me. But I liked to imagine the night sky was a great satin cloak, upon which some clumsy celestial hand had spilled a quantity of crystals beyond measure.” 

Bilbo laughed joyfully, and Thorin was surprised to find he took no offense at being the cause of it. 

“That is certainly very dwarfish of you,” he said, “and rather sweet as well, if you don’t mind my saying. I used to imagine that the night sky was a quilt, through which the needles of heaven had left their little holes and allowed some of their divinity to spill out.”

“What a hobbit you are,” Thorin replied, now certain that he was smiling too. “The night is nigh upon us, my friend. We may see divinity yet.” 

Bilbo hummed contentedly, seeming to be very happy with the thought. “Did you ever find patterns in the stars, then?” he asked, after a moment. “My cousin Odo Proudfoot and I used to stay out long past our bedtimes looking for the ladles and urns our grandfather had shown us… Though this was before Odo went off and became a rather grouchy old badger, mind you.”

The idea of a round-cheeked little Bilbo excitedly scanning the skies for the hint of some cosmic teacup or infinite doily was a rather endearing one, Thorin thought, and it warmed his heart to imagine it. 

“Our dwarfish constellations are more often navigational in nature,” he replied, “although a few of them belong to legend as well. I used to admire a particular one, a warrior-king of old whose sword-tip was always the first star to appear in the sky, and was said to point the traveler toward Erebor no matter the direction from which they approached.”

“And where is that?” Bilbo asked, craning his head upward toward the fast-approaching night. “Will it appear just above us then?”

“Regrettably no,” Thorin said, though he hated to disappoint him. “It faded into the night a decade or so before the dragon came. The warrior remains, for now, but his purpose is lost.”

“Oh,” Bilbo frowned. “That is rather sad.” 

“Perhaps,” replied Thorin with a nod. “Still, there are other stars. It seems that among the greatest of the lessons I am to be required to learn in this lifetime, there is the truth that no hope is ever banished that cannot be replaced.”

The hobbit considered his words for a moment or more, breathing deeply as if he meant to internalize their meaning. 

“Is that…” he began at last, appearing to consider his words carefully. “Do you feel that way about love, then? You lost your One, as you have said. Is there any hope that you may yet find another with whom you might spend your days?” 

Thorin shook his head firmly, and adamantly refused to acknowledge the painful beating in his chest at the very suggestion. 

“The stars may be infinite, yet I have but one heart,” he said. “It cannot be reclaimed, nor in truth would I wish it to be. It is his, and always will be, beyond the grasp of death or despair.”

Bilbo nodded slowly, and it was both a blessing and a curse that in the fast-approaching dark Thorin could no longer see his expression. 

“We ought to go,” the little burglar said, after a final moment of silence passed between them. “The last light of Durin’s Day is nearly upon us, and it would not do for us to spoil the purpose of our mission by being distracted by idle chitchat. What on earth would your legends have to say about that, I wonder?” 

With a lighthearted air that did not match Thorin’s own, the hobbit sprang up and rushed to join their companions, where they had nearly given up on their fruitless efforts in favor of grumbling rather fervently about everything under the dwindling sun. And in doing so, he left behind him nothing but the hollow refrain of words left unspoken, and a single small handprint in the dirt, where he had rested his weight as he had unconsciously leaned toward Thorin during their conversation. 

The king, for his part, recognized the wisdom of his friend’s words – though he was loathe to depart from one of the very last moments of solace and respite he was to be allowed before the days that he had dreaded were upon them. And for that very reason, he paused only for a scarce moment to cover the impression of that little hand with his own, before he too rose and went to meet his fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one was a bit of a wait, I've had a busy week, as I'm sure many of you have! Meant to actually get Bilbo to that important meeting of his by the end of this chapter, but after almost 8,000 words I felt like it might be a bit of a slog for the reader to jump into the action right then... Also, what's the harm in just letting them be mostly happy and almost communicative for once? Anyway, as always, thank you for all the very nice messages and comments and kudos and bookmarks and whatnot and so forth, I definitely would not be dedicating a few hours of every week to continuing this without them (much as I do have lots of fun writing it, I'm unfortunately very busy). Stay safe out there, hope you're all well


	16. Chapter 16

The door opened, as doors do. 

Bilbo had expected this, of course, but even so the depthless dread he felt at seeing it showed apparently scarce regard for what it was he did or did not happen to anticipate, and it grew like a wicked vine in his poor stomach, wrapping itself cruelly around his heart. 

The dwarves – who had so recently rushed to insert their key when first the slotted keyhole had cracked its way rather accommodatingly through solid stone – now regarded the dark and gloomy pathway which was thence revealed to them with a trepidation that seemed to equal Bilbo’s own (though he was quite bitterly aware that not a one of them understood the terrible things that lay in store for them, even by half). Still, they could hardly be blamed for doing so. The gloom of abandonment seemed to drift with eerie persistence from what little of the bleak and hollow halls was visible, and darkness itself flowed outward from them like a vapor. Somehow worse, even, was the knowledge that this impression of vacancy was nothing more than an illusion, and that the very chill of shadow itself was powerless in the face of dragon fire. Somewhere far below them, a strange devilry lurked. 

“Well then,” said Glóin (who had been tasked with the maintenance of all their most important documents, being that he was a financier of some great renown), “I suppose it is time for our intended burglar to make good on the terms of his contract.” 

A number of their party then nodded, though they looked hardly happy about it, while others instead seemed prepared to argue the point – and likely would do, were they able to come up with a reasonable purpose for keeping Bilbo aground and a good distance from danger. There were none, of course, and he knew this quite well... Furthermore still, he was a Baggins, and Bagginses made good on their word, no matter how foolishly it might have been given. 

Regardless of any of these facts, there was a general sprinkling of grumblings and groanings, and before long the dwarves began as any of their race ever did when faced with a matter of seemingly clear resolution: they debated it endlessly. Dori, for one, was rather insistent that the terms of Bilbo’s indenture were exceedingly vague, and that any burglary having been committed at all in their time together would resolve it in the eyes of the law. This seemed to intrigue Balin, who removed a delicate pair of spectacles from a small pouch in his breastpocket, and balanced them upon the very tip of his rounded nose as he reviewed various documents which Glóin was able to ceaselessly produce from a small satchel on his hip. Nori, meanwhile, was convinced that Bilbo had signed the contract under the duress of wizardly magic, and recited a number of dwarven laws on the subject with an impressive familiarity. 

Knowing very well that there was little he might hope to do to derail their current course of conversation, Bilbo instead took advantage of the moment to step aside, and he approached a small thrush which had perched itself a short distance from the very entrance of Erebor, where it was regarding their proceedings with as great a look of interest as any of its species was capable of having. 

“Pardon me,” Bilbo whispered to it when he was quite close enough (though he felt a touch foolish in doing so), “would you happen to be one of the thrushes of Dale, who can speak to its descendants in a secret tongue?” 

The bird did not respond – beyond grooming its pale-yellow plumage for a moment, and then snatching up one of the great snails that crawled along the mountainside before cracking its shell cleanly apart by bashing it upon a nearby rock. This was very little encouraging to poor Bilbo, but he continued onward with a slightly shaken but still wonderfully resilient hope, as he nearly always managed to. 

“Well if you are,” he said, “you must fly to Bard, a bowman and captain of a company of archers in Esgaroth, and you must warn him that the door has been opened, and the dragon may be nigh upon them. Please also remind him of the weakness in the dragon’s breastplate, which I mentioned to him once before. And if you aren’t… well, then I’ve made myself rather silly just now. But you won’t understand that, in such a case, so no harm done I suppose.” 

The bird did not laugh at him, but neither did it respond to his urging with much haste, and it picked away lazily at the snail it had captured for a long while before at last it flew off. 

Bilbo watched it go with some trepidation, as he was not at all confident that his message would ever reach its intended recipient. But he saw no other means of communication on the stark and barren slopes of the Lonely Mountain, and he therefore rejoined his friends, and banished the matter rather resignedly from his thoughts. 

Thorin, for his part, seemed to have grown tired of the arguments of his company, and at seeing the hobbit’s approach he silenced them with a raise of his hand and an exceedingly stern expression (which knit his dark brows together rather handsomely, in Bilbo’s mind). 

“Our Mr. Baggins has indeed fulfilled the terms of his employment, as has been pointed out by many of you,” the king began rather slowly, as if he were considering his every word before he spoke it. “Indeed, he has proven himself to be the best of companions in our journeying, and is possessed of a courage far exceeding his size, as well as an allotment of good luck beyond his fair rations to boot. I therefore feel it is only wise to offer that, were he to wish it, he may be henceforth released in good will from the calling of any duties he may consider unfulfilled, and-”

Bilbo had heard quite enough of this, for he was by this point twice as familiar as you or I with Thorin’s style of oration on such important and daunting occasions, and he presently realized that the only thing standing in the way of a resolution to the revolting roiling in his stomach – by one means or another – was, in fact, the considerable impediment of a great speech to mark the whole horrible affair. 

“Will you please just state your purpose at once and be done with it, O Thorin Thrainson Oakenshield,” he interrupted crossly. “I have no interest in standing about and watching your beard grow until at last you drift toward the matter at hand. In fact, I must tell you that it is very unhobbitish to be late for an appointment, no matter how dastardly your host, and I have no intention to begin such a habit for your sake. Now, if the lot of you will move aside, I will journey down into your horrible mountain and take a peek at whatever lies below it.” 

Thorin scowled at him, appearing rather annoyed at having been so rudely interrupted at the onset of what surely would have been a remarkable speech, but Bilbo found that he hardly cared a whit for anyone’s pride but his own, at the moment. He rather felt that he was balancing precariously upon the very cusp of a number of horrible events, and though to fall into them was inevitable, he would be damned if he did not do it intentionally. 

“Are you sure, lad?” Balin asked him, in a tone of reserved concern that was far preferable to the more overt outrage on many of his companions’ faces. “You’re under no obligation, you understand. The door has been opened with as much urgency as was required, but there is yet time to consider other means of approach beyond this point.” 

“I’m quite positive,” Bilbo said firmly. “I’ve come all this way in the name of accomplishing a single job, and I will see it done.”

Luckily, the dwarves seemed to respect the logic of his statement, and thus they parted from where they had blocked the door in their bickering, and finally allowed him to pass by. 

To enter into the deep and terrible darkness ahead of him was no small matter, and Bilbo felt it was only reasonable that he hesitated for the merest of moments before he submerged himself in the gloom. He did not get very far, however, before a voice echoed from the close stone walls on either side of him, and caused him to turn back to the small shaft of moonlight that poured hesitantly inward from the entryway. 

“Wait!” Thorin cried, with an urgency that had apparently banished his previous affliction of long-windedness. “Bilbo, wait!” 

The hobbit stopped, of course, and waited for the darkened figure of the dwarven king to stumble toward him. 

“Bilbo,” Thorin said, seeming almost breathless despite the fact that they were not yet so very far into the depths of the cold and dismal corridor, which appeared to stretch endlessly down and inward for miles upon miles. “Bilbo, I have something I meant to give you.” 

At saying this, he reached into his pocket, where Bilbo could hear the rattling of what sounded like wood upon wood for a moment, before a small and roughly-carved object was pressed into his hands. 

“It’s a whistle,” Thorin said. “I’m no great hand at whittling, I must admit, but I consulted Bofur before I made it, and it works well enough. I regret that I cannot follow you where you now must go – for as Gandalf pointed out at the beginning of our journey, the dragon recognizes the smell of dwarrow well, and I will not risk waking the beast when you are so very near to him. But if any misfortune should befall you, blow on the whistle. I will be listening for as long as you are down there, be it moments or hours. And at any sound of your distress, we will all come after you. You have my word.” 

Thorin delivered his promise with such emphatacism that Bilbo could not help but believe him, much as his mind insisted that any idea of his safety would be abruptly banished from the dwarf’s mind at the very hint of the treasures he held in such high regard. Still, it was a comfort to him to hear such things, and he did not doubt that Thorin meant his every word, at present. 

“Thank you, Thorin,” he replied, clutching the little trinket tightly in his hand with the slightest fear that he might drop it in the darkness, and it would be lost forever. 

“Listen to me,” Thorin pleaded then, seemingly not finished with what it was he wanted to say. “You also must promise me that you will not take a single piece of treasure from the hoard, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem. Dragons are fiercely jealous creatures, and Smaug will smell the very absence of any of his trinkets from the moment he wakes. Take nothing, and do not linger.” 

“Are you sure there is nothing you would like me to search for?” Bilbo prodded, as the taste of encroaching bitterness began to seep into his mind. “Nothing you’d like me to discover in your esteemed halls?” 

Thorin seemed mightily confused by his sudden shift in tone, and paused for a moment before responding. “Nothing, my friend,” he said. “I want for nothing but your safety, though I suppose I thank you for asking.” 

“Not even the Arkenstone, then?” Bilbo demanded, though he did not know why, as he knew from the very moment he said it that his utterance was highly unwise. 

“The Arkenstone?” Thorin demanded, seeming somehow offended that Bilbo might even mention its name. “How do you know of it? Who have you spoken to?” 

“I grew up under a hill,” Bilbo retorted, “not under a rock, you oaf.” 

This was, of course, exceedingly rude, but the tone of possessive discomfort that had crept into Thorin’s voice had entirely banished any earlier warmth he might have felt regarding the king’s kind hopes for his safety. 

He knew well enough what was Precious to Thorin. 

All at once, and despite the obscurity of the shadows in which they already lurked, he felt a deep and desperate desire to wear the little ring in his pocket, and to disappear entirely from this dreadful world. 

The king, for his part, had not responded to Bilbo’s unkind remarks, but Bilbo could feel him positively stewing with thought only a short distance away, and he found that he did not like the uncertain implications of his already having upset the one he was very soon fated to lose. So horrible was the sensation, in fact, that he turned his heel with little more than a passing repetition of his gratitude for the gift he’d been given, and hastily made a retreat from the troubling ambiguity of the world and the trembling affairs of his heart. And thus, without hesitation, he delved further into the safety of the gloom. 

******* 

Bilbo ventured on and on into the depths of Erebor’s back passages for a good long time, as their winding ways took him further and further at an ever-sloping angle from small corridors to slowly-expanding anterooms and eternally-impressive galleries. Down, down, down, he went, and after having done so he proceeded only to go down further, for it seemed there were no limits to the declinations of dwarves and their insistent digging. 

Erebor itself was exceedingly impressive, if not a tad chilly, and Bilbo found that he was just as stupefied by the overwhelming grandeur of it as he had been at first witnessing it. Even in the most commonsensical and practical of its chambers, the kingdom was not simply large, it was massive. To say that the vaulted ceilings were tall was not only to vastly misrepresent the soaring distance they maintained from the steady ground, it was to disrespect the colossal wideness and breadth of everything over which they towered. And were you to summon the words to adequately describe the expansive longitudinal enormity of any given room in which you stood, your success would only be met with the knowledge that in the time it took you to affirm the length of the place, your remarks upon its heights had long since drifted away ever upward, bound to be lost to the nearly ceaseless ether above your little head, and you would thereupon be obliged to start all over again. It was a vastness that hardly bore speaking of, and so Bilbo quickly resolved not to do so - even only to himself - and thus he lingered on it no longer. 

Unfortunately, space in such volumes must always be filled, and being as there was now neither people nor light as might have once have done the trick, Bilbo found that it was rather his thoughts themselves that sought to crowd the vacancy around him. They passed through his mind unbidden and unwanted, and did little to encourage his dreary steps forward with their subject matter. 

“I am fire,” insisted a voice in his head that was surely not his own, “I am death.” 

That was, of course, the familiarly dreadful intonations of Smaug, whose reptilian promises of imminent destruction trod a well-grooved path through the unconscious recesses of Bilbo’s mind. He had heard them often enough, even decades later, as his sleeping hours had been regularly revisited by the dreadful memory of their first distant utterance. 

Laced beneath them, however, a fainter voice whispered deeper vows, which were perhaps more unnerving in the obscurity of their meaning. 

“There is no life in the void,” warned some unknown being with frightful conviction, “only death…” 

On and on it too went, muttering wicked things that caused the frosty breaths from Bilbo’s aching lungs to stutter and shake with his every exhalation. And it was nearly a relief when a far more familiar baritone parted the oppressive chill of such infernal oaths, though the words that were then spoken were ones that had visited upon his dreams with twice the frequency of any that had come before, and the tone with which they were delivered still hurt him terribly to hear. 

“You have no claim over me, you miserable little rat,” Thorin’s silent growl seemed to fill the empty chambers with a certainty that it belonged there. “Do not speak to me of loyalty… Throw him from the ramparts, or I will do it myself, if I must!” 

At hearing such wrenching demands repeated, Bilbo cringed away from them ever-so-slightly, though he knew well enough that they were only in his head, and as such they ought not have such dreadful claim over his heart. Even so, their repetition made him miserable, and he knew well enough – in all his familiarity – that the scene he was apparently to subconsciously relive (even now, at the very brink of its once more taking place before him) was far from finished. 

“Curse you!” the voice in his mind continued on, breaking almost weakly in its emphatic force. “I am betrayed… Take him now, if you wish him to live, or I may throw him down! And know that no friendship of mine goes with him.”

Almost unnoticed, in all his distracted dismay, the smooth and frigid stones at Bilbo’s feet had begun to warm, and he found that he was nearly upon the treasure room of Erebor itself before he even registered his proximity to it. Indeed, for a moment he worried that his careless approach might have revealed something of his presence to the dragon far sooner than he had intended, before he noticed that he had at some point – without quite recalling having done it – put the ring on one of his fingers, and thus he was as invisible as any hobbit could hope to be. 

This was very odd, to be sure, but given that he had quite a few more pressing problems to worry about, he resolved to think on it later. 

Thus, it was with a determined sort of stealth that Bilbo at last passed beyond the heavily-columned entranceway into the great coffers of the dwarven kingdom, and the splendid sight of mountains upon flowing mountains of uncountable wealth and craftsmanship was once more made known to him. The enormous quantities of gold and jewels that lay before him became nigh-iridescent when lit by the interspersed glow of draconic flame (which exceeds all mortal quantities of kindled fire – defined as it so often is by blues and reds – and is instead the very color of the moon). 

The great slabs of granite at his feet continued to warm as he approached a towering mound of gently shifting treasure (wherein, he suspected, Smaug must lie) with enormous care, and as he drew closer to it he found that the majority of the metals and gems over which he delicately and carefully traversed did not do half so admirable a job of refusing the great heat around them as the stone upon which they lay, and that objects of copper and brass in particular were best avoided lest the delicate hairs on his feet be burned by their mere proximity. 

It was inevitable that Bilbo was to be discovered, of course, but even with all his clever canniness and stealthful sneaking, the event of it still occurred far more quickly than he had hoped for. In the end, it was the very thing that Gandalf had once suggested may be to his advantage that was in fact his very undoing – for, being as the room was of an inestimable enormity, and it had prevalent sources of both heat and cold, there was a considerable and drafty approximation of wind which coursed insistently through it. And though Bilbo was at the bottom of a rather large pile of jewels, it is still a fact known by most who know anything at all that hot air, of course, rises. 

And so it was that the dragon was woken by the unfamiliar and intriguing scent of a very small and very close hobbit. 

The first part of the dragon that revealed itself was, rather fittingly, a single nostril of his snout, which shot a great spurt of gold coins away from it like a geyser in its insistence to clear its passages and capture a lungful of such an unknown aroma. Unfortunately, this small bit of dragon was quickly followed by the rest of it, as Smaug determined that the presence of an indeterminate intruder was quite compelling enough to be roused entirely from what was surely a comfortable slumber. 

The dragon uncoiled from his relaxed repose, and at once it became dreadfully clear to Bilbo that the daunting memories of his enormity had not been exaggerated by time in even the slightest measure. Ridiculous as it was, he then thought at once of the dragon-shaped firework that had been let loose at his eleventy-first birthday by those rascals, Merry and Pippin, and he wished terribly that he were back in the Shire with little to worry about but visits from unwanted relations and the occasional pie being stolen from his sill. Or, indeed, that he were anywhere else at all – even visiting the dungeons of the elvenking once more – as long as it meant that he was not exactly here, exactly now. 

“Oh dear,” he said to himself. 

And for a moment after that, there was silence, broken only by the occasional avalanche of stirring gold, and the enormous gusts of air that rocketed scaldingly from the dragon’s nostrils, as he coiled himself higher and higher to sit atop the very treasure within which he had so recently rested. 

“I smell you, thief,” Smaug rumbled at last, without a thought toward introduction. “I can feel you on the air.” 

As he said this, an enormous tongue shot past his wickedly-grinning lips, and at tasting Bilbo on the currents of a false wind he turned his head in the hobbit’s direction with frightful accuracy. 

“I hear your breath, I know the feeble pounding of your heart,” the dragon continued. “I sense the darkness that surrounds you, even… You are wreathed in it.” 

“The darkness?” Bilbo demanded, his hopes for secrecy now abandoned, and his terror almost half-forgotten in his confusion as to the wretched beast’s meaning. “Whatever are you implying, O Smaug the Celebrious?” 

“Oh yes, little thief,” Smaug replied, seeming nearly as intrigued with the oddness of his words as Bilbo, and the rumbling of his very voice shook more silver pots and stone-encrusted chalices from their resting places, so that they fell and crashed frighteningly close to the poor hobbit. “There is a darkness upon you… You do not carry it, nor does it carry you. But I know flame, and there is a black ember at the core of you, which threatens to consume your heart.” 

“I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is you’re speaking of, O Chiefest of Calamities,” Bilbo replied, and as he did so he attempted to back away slowly and silently from the point where the dragon had determined his presence, though its slitted eyes followed his invisible movements without any apparent trouble at all. 

“Don’t you, then?” Smaug growled, and in a single fluid motion he slithered his head closer to where Bilbo now cowered, hardly able to breath. “If you are no messenger of darkness, then what do you claim to be? I have not smelled your kind before. Perhaps a servant of the dwarves, then? Though your manners certainly exceed their own.”

This, Bilbo thought, was a rather harsh judgment from one who had invited himself into the home of the very people he now criticized, and had made himself quite comfortable despite their plain wishes that he leave. But now was certainly not the time to say such things, he understood, and as he disregarded this judgment a rather more clever inkling took its place. 

“I am certainly not a servant of the dwarves, O Smaug the Extolled and Greatly Esteemed,” he replied, with the rare conviction of an impossibly-slight hope. “Nor am I the servant of any but the Dark Lord Sauron, once servant of Morgoth, who will be master of us all.” 

“Explain yourself,” Smaug demanded, the rumbling of his fury causing the very ground to shake, and now piles upon piles of gold and jewels shivered and swayed with its vibration. “Though you must bear in mind as you do so, little thief, that Death itself cannot strip the flesh from your bones half so quickly as I…”

“You have sensed the darkness upon me in all your cleverness,” Bilbo declared with a weakly trembling voice, as his bravery faded with every passing moment, and he reached hesitantly toward his pocket where the little whistle was tucked safely away. “Even so, I am the merest of hints as to the great and terrible power of the one I serve. Just now, his armies of orcs march ever closer to your mountain, and soon we will claim it. Our expansion is unstoppable, and you will perish in its wake. I am merely the messenger, meant to warn you of his blade so that you might appreciate the cruelty of its thrust when at last you feel it.” 

At hearing this, Smaug let out an almighty roar of unquenchable ferocity, and he began to stamp his feet in a boundless rage that sent wave upon wave of riches cascading in every direction, which threatened to bury Bilbo alive. He ran then, and ducked under the relative security of a stone terrace, though he knew with a crushing certainty that he was yet far from safety. 

“You dare to threaten me!” the dragon shrieked, and in his anger his tail began to sweep in enormous motions back and forth, displacing entire columns of solid granite, and causing Bilbo to fret over the idea of the entire mountain coming crashing down atop the both of them. “You dare to suggest the very idea of my defeat! I am beyond the veil of death, there are no epithets that do me justice! I am Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities, Smaug the Terrible, Lord of the Lonely Mountain, Mighty and Unassailably Wealthy!” 

“And what of it?” Bilbo demanded at a shout, hoping – if nothing else – that distraction might halt the destruction the dragon had begun to cause, though it seemed far too much to hope that he would survive the encounter as it had panned out regardless of his efforts to adjust it in any direction at all. 

Nevertheless, he continued on. 

“I too have many titles,” he shouted over the wretched cacophany, “they call me Clue-Finder, Web-Cutter, and the Lucky Number itself! I have drowned my friends only to draw them alive from the water, and though I come from the end of a bag no bag has come over me! Friend of bears, guest of eagles, I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer, and Barrel-rider besides! Beyond all that, I am a messenger of orcs, who yet march closer over hill and under forest from the west, and I come with a promise of your destruction!” 

This caused Smaug to roar again, and a great ball of flame began to rattle around in his chest – casting its pale white light through the smallest creases in his impenetrable armor of scales and gems – as he prepared to scorch the very earth at his feet. 

“I am indestructible!” the dragon roared with earth-shattering rage. “I have no demise, the void itself cannot touch me! I am Fire, I am Death!” 

As he said so, the faintest whisper of another voice sounded once more in the very back of Bilbo’s head, and though he did not recognize the language it spoke he knew well enough that the dark intonations of its utterances harkened only doom and dismay. At noticing this, he was at once desperate to rid himself of the influence of the ring, for he realized – with some degree of startling and transient clarity – that its terrible influence had begun to take root in the shadowed recesses of his subconscious mind. And so he wrenched the dratted thing from his finger, and returned it to his pocket, where he instead removed the crude little whistle Thorin had gifted him. 

For the briefest of moments as he had done so, Bilbo had abandoned his careful observation of Smaug entirely, and in such a short period the dragon had managed to knock over a good number of the remaining pillars, and had scratched long and angry scars across the beautifully carved walls of Erebor’s treasure-hold. Now, the growing fire in the dragon’s chest was crackling at his throat with a dull roar, and his intentions with it were rather apparent. 

Bilbo had hardly a moment to duck behind a pillar before an explosion of heat and an enormous rush of air blew past him on either side. Flames licked their way almost lazily toward where he crouched, exposed and unprotected, and there was little he could do but curl himself into as tight a ball as he could manage, cover his head as best he could, and wait for the torment of such fear to end in whatever manner it may. 

After what felt like the entirety of an elf’s lifetime at the very least, the sensation of cruelly burning air teasing at his back began to fade, and after another eternity Bilbo very carefully relaxed his arms to such an extent that his ears were no longer covered, and he could listen for any sounds of movement around him. 

There were none, he discovered, and after a good long while spent waiting there was yet still only a silent and eerie calm to be heard from every side. 

Bilbo hesitated a moment more, for safety’s sake, before he very carefully sat up, and twice as carefully snuck his way from beneath the little stone terrace where he had hidden to look at the now empty room. 

And for a moment after that, he sat in the stillness, and did not move, and hardly dared breathe. 

And then he raised the whistle to his lips, and blew with all his might. 

**************** 

History, as we all know, is “a thing what goes back forever, and tends to be written in books and the like”. This particular descriptor was one provided many years ago to Bilbo Baggins by his neighbor Hamfast Gamgee during a conversation about lilacs that got enormously out of hand, but it remains as remarkably succinct a summation as might be given by any layman, and may be considered twice so when compared to any given by an actual historian. If nothing else, Hamfast was certainly right – for history is, indeed, a thing what goes back forever, and is found in many books, though at present the most important book it is to be found in is this one. 

In this book, of course, few historians were consulted – if any at all. Were they to be, however, and were their remarks upon any given subject to be boiled down and reduced to only those which held any significant meaning, their messages would likely be approximately thus: regarding the history of Middle Earth, and more specifically the history of the major races which still exist upon it, there is one single attribute which Men, Elves, and Dwarves alike all share in equity, and that is the fact that they never agree on anything. 

You might take bows, as an excellent example. At first glance, the existence and prevalence of bows and arrows in each of their many societies might suggest that the three major races do in fact share in some sort of singular archery-colored thread, which has been woven through their distinctly differing cultural tapestries in a position of certain significance. But while this romantic idea might be modestly true, to some small degree, their tendency to argue about the minutiae of build and usage and technique was, and always would be, one of such an enormous extent that the fact that they all enjoyed using one large stick to propel a littler one – quite often at each other – became almost inconsequentially useless in the face of their differences of opinion as to the very nature of it. 

Indeed, each race felt that they had arrived upon the perfect approach to bowmanship, though the route they had taken to get there invariably happened to be one paved with an empirical logic that seemed entirely unavailable to the others. Elves, for one, preferred the simplicity of a very short recurve bow, and no mechanistic periphery or fanfare at all about their usage of it. (This, the Men and Dwarves agreed, was a ridiculous metric to be held to, as neither of them lived long enough to master such a delicate weapon). Dwarves, on the other hand, enjoyed their gadgetry immensely, and tended to load their compound bows down with so many accessories for range-finding and unimpeded string-releasing that the Men and Elves often wondered at how they were able to see past them well enough to hit anything at all (and more often joked that they couldn’t, really). 

Men, however, rarely lived long enough to become good at anything of any sort. Such was their lot in life (or what little of it they experienced). For this reason, they tended to prefer crossbows for their simplicity and ease of mastery – which the Dwarves and Elves mocked was a matter of an hour or less, which they then found it enormously funny to further remark might see them well into old age. Still, there were a singular few Men who dedicated the time and effort necessary to become properly skilled with proper bows, and when they did, they were in fact highly formidable. 

Bard was one such bowman, and even among his small troop of longbow-wielding Lake-men (for what few Men invested the effort still preferred longbows, as the size was more forgiving of slight alterations to the position of the wrist, which anyone without an immortal amount of practice might be prone to) he was considered definitively adept. One might have argued – and in fact many did – that the truth of his talent lay in his ancestry, descended as he was from a long line of skilled archers, even so that his great-something grandfather was Girion, once Lord of Dale, who was gifted a set of black arrows beyond price from the forges of Thrór himself. The plain fact of the matter, however, was rather more simple: he was a man of constant and cognizant effort, and any aptitude he showed was merely a symptom of having put in the work necessary to attain it. 

It should hereupon be remarked, though, that it was not only his bowmanship into which he invested his all. Above everything else, he considered himself to be a family man, and just behind that in steadfast dedication was the loyalty he felt to his people. Not all of the residents of Lake-town were his people, of course – for some of them had far more than they deserved, and even delighted in flaunting that fact to those who could hardly understand the vast unseen scale of it. But the poor, the weary, the downtrodden. The good… When Bard had long ago sworn his fealty to Lake-town, it was – in his mind – to them alone that he pledged his service. 

And it was for them alone that he faced the dragon. 

Much as he had been tempted to disbelieve the little dwarven visitor at his door, when first the so-claimed king had entered unbidden, his remarkably humble and almost guileless insistence as to the danger in store for them had convinced the man almost entirely. And where the second visitor should only have furthered his doubts, the hobbit had seemed more earnest and concerned than he had any need to be, in Bard’s mind (for he was a rather suspicious sort, and had thus far lived a life which had hardly attempted to dissuade him of such a disposition). Nevertheless, though the hobbit had scarcely provided him with much of anything in the way of solid information, his unguarded nature and kindly concern had reminded Bard ever-so-slightly of his own children, who so often showed their caring hearts with little fear of the dangers that accompanied being so exposed, and his natural defensiveness had been weakened as a result. 

So it was that when the yellow-breasted thrush alighted on his shoulder and warbled a warning of doom yet to come, he was not only very little surprised, but was in fact greatly prepared. Not only had his children been evacuated to the forests at the edge of the lake, but a sizable portion of the residents of Esgaroth had too followed his urgings with very little questioning, and were now accompanying them. There they would stay, until their homes were wrapped in fire and reduced to cinder, or he was made an utter fool. 

For a short while, it must be admitted, he felt like an utter fool indeed, for the final light of Durin’s Day – as had been forewarned by the dwarven king – had long since come and gone, and there had been hardly an errant plume of smoke from the mountain to suggest that anything darker than the encroaching night itself had yet come to pass. 

Still, he had kept his men at the ready, bows at their sides, and the incorruptible patience of simple allegiance in their hearts, as they awaited his signal. 

And then, a glow began to seep from the mountain. 

Every damaged gate and long-abandoned balistraria was alight with it, and he fancifully imagined he might even see the small door of Durin atop one of the many high cliffs, where it was surely still propped open. 

“You see?” insisted a guardsman from the halls of the Master, though he seemed little convinced by his own message. “Just as we were told, the forges of the King Under the Mountain are rekindled.” 

“That is no dwarven fire,” Bard murmured back. “There is but one flame that burns so hot.” 

The guardsman did not respond, beyond taking in a shaky breath, and there was suddenly a stillness to all that was left of Lake-town as every remaining resident simply ceased in their errands and stopped their drunken wanderings home to watch the great shafts of white light spill from the Lonely Mountain like errant and over-burning stars, and to listen as waves and ice lapped at the ancient wooden beams below their feet. 

And then, all at once: 

“Dragon!” shouted a voice from afar, and it was filled with fear. 

“Dragon!” came another, and ceaseless screaming followed soon after. 

Bard searched the heavy night sky, and with the sinking weight of certainty in his heart he sighted an enormous creature as it shot from the main gate of the once-more-lightless Erebor, and stretched its batlike wings to such a width that only the pale outline of the moon – filtered in a bloody red – shone through its nigh-translucent skin. 

The screaming redoubled, as what few boats remained were boarded and shoved off, with hardly a thought to their being filled appropriately or by exactly whom. The guardsman at Bard’s side gasped and began to tremble, before he too ran off, presumably in search of their supposed leader. 

And beside him, Bard’s men did not move, nor did they speak. 

“Hold steady, bows in hand, men!” He called with a decided conviction, from which he could not allow himself even the slightest waverance. 

Each of his men gripped their bows, and with the same confidence – one relying on the other, and further knowing that they too were depended upon, and could not allow their morale to falter – their eyes followed the shadowed beast as it flew ever closer. 

“Steady, on my mark!” Bard said, knowing well that the dragon was yet too far to draw upon, though his inaction in the face of incoming peril chafed at his resolve. 

“Steady…. Draw!” he continued, and as he commanded, each man nocked an arrow and drew their string, but did not release. 

And so they waited for a moment, and then a moment longer, as the dragon came nearly within range of them. 

Before it veered. 

At what felt to be the last possible second, it flapped its wings with dexterity far exceeding its enormous size, and began to fly westwardly, and away from them. A great gust of warm wind fanned over them at its very proximity, and the bowmen followed its retreating form with silent determination, though their shoulders began to burn with the effort of maintaining such an enormous draw-force as their race preferred to shoot with, and before long the dragon was outside of their line of sight entirely. 

“Stand down.” Bard said at last, and his men relaxed their positions at his command, though they were far from at ease themselves. 

“What happened?” one of them asked, after a long while’s pause. “Has it gone then?” 

“I do not know,” Bard responded carefully, “but I very much doubt it.”

He looked to the Lonely Mountain, which was once more shrouded in darkness, and he silently wished for a secondary messenger in some form that might carry any news of their fortune, though he did not dare bother to hope for any. 

For a long while, there was yet another silence, as if he was not alone in disbelieving their luck. Those who were left on the boardwalks of Esgaroth began to mumble to each other in confusion, and those who had begun to escape simply floated at a distance from them, seemingly unwilling to exert the effort required for further desertion, but yet uncertain of the wisdom in returning. 

Their answer came within an hour. 

Once more, it was a faint glow of light which announced itself before the shadowy outline of the dragon ever managed to. This time, however, it was small and distant, on the very point where the jutting outlines of far-off mountains cut black patterns in the starry sky, and it seemed to shimmer in some undefinable way which might – at any other time – have appeared to be beautiful. 

“Bows in hand, men,” Bard warned gravely, though not one of them had un-nocked their arrows entirely. 

As the dragon drew nearer once more, it became apparent that the almost glistening quality to its light came from the fact that the flame that inspired it was no longer erupting from any mountain or mouth in full form, but was instead growing and raging in the dragon’s chest, where it strained outward from between shifting scales, and was refracted by the many jewels that were tucked amongst its underbelly, and which fell carelessly into the water below with every beat of its terrible wings. 

“On my mark…” Bard said slowly, and with enormous patience. “On my mark… Draw!” 

And once again, every man did so, as they became deaf to the sounds of pandemonium and panic just beyond them, and focused entirely on the dragon that bore down on them, and the certainty that their arrows would fly true. 

Bard, too, nocked his arrow, as once he had before – a black one, and one of a few which were passed down to him from his father, as his own father had passed them to him, and so one before that – and he fit his stance into the same position he could always rely on, each of his preferred tendencies like an anchor-point that reassured him with the steadfastness of routine. 

He dusted his string fingers with resin, careful and unrushed. 

An intake of breath. 

The long rawhide string grazed his nose as he pulled it back, and he turned his head slightly so as not to clip it upon release, thereby altering the trajectory of his shot by even the slightest of margins. 

A turkey-feather fletching – always dutifully replaced and maintained at the slightest hint of wear – tickled at the corner of his mouth. 

An exhale. 

An intake. 

The dragon drew nearer.

“On my mark….” he said, as calmly as he could. “…Loose!” 

An exhale. 

An arrow flew. 

The world flooded back, ever so slightly, as the small troop watched their wave of impossibly meager projectiles nearly vanish into the night, before their gazes turned to the dragon as it continued advancing on them, entirely unbothered. 

“Remember men,” Bard warned, his show of confidence undeterred (for well he knew, in matters of aim the slightest of doubts as to your ability only meant certain failure). “There is a chink in his armor, on the left breastplate. Nock…. Draw….” 

And there they waited for a moment, as the dragon was finally upon them, and began to spurt great bursts of immeasurably scorching flame without discrimination upon the roofs below. 

And still they did not release, for the dragon was turned broadside toward them, and his weakness was not exposed. 

“Steady, men…” Bard warned, as a pile of barrels and netting was set alight by falling embers only a short distance from them, and the stench of burning fish filled their nostrils. 

Yet still, the dragon did not turn. 

“Steady… Loose!” Bard called, as the dragon finally began to quarter-to in their direction, and for a moment the pale pink flesh on a fraction of its underside was visible for the briefest of moments. 

Once more, a cresting stream of arrows darted through the night sky – some gathering flames from crumbling towers and steeples which were lit up like pyres, so that their trajectory was visible as the dragon turned from them and they ricocheted once more, falling into the lake below. 

“You glimpsed it then?” Bard asked, and each of his men nodded with fierce courage. They would be burned with their resolve, if they had nothing else. 

“Nock… Draw…” he said once more. 

And then the dragon, having crushed their modest marketplace with one terrible sweep of its foul tail, turned to them in full – apparently having noticed their efforts after all – and tilted its head curiously, as if they were nothing more than fruit flies that were to be swatted from a rotting meal before it could be eaten, and as if the thought of it delighted him. 

“Bowmen….” The beast rumbled, the water of the lake sloshing frantically against the docks nearby as it quivered at the depth and fury of his voice. 

Distantly, a bell rang, its once-proud tone becoming muffled and tinny as the very heat around it warped the shape that gave it voice. Five tolls, before it was silenced. It called for evacuation. 

Not a man among them moved. 

“You are forsaken,” the dragon continued to taunt, as it flapped its wings above them in great gusts of sweltering and suffocating air. And yet, still, its singular frailty remained hidden behind the curve of an enormous arm. “The very people you seek to protect have long since abandoned you…” 

“Steady!” Bard pleaded, “Steady men!” 

His men trembled, but still they did not move. 

“What will you do now?” The dragon asked, its eyes dancing with the reflections of fire, and the growing blaze in its chest lighting a horrible smile of utterly wicked glee. “No one fights but you. No help will come. You will burn…” 

And there he lingered on the final word, as if it delighted him entirely. 

But as he did so, he shifted, just slightly. 

Inhale. 

The air was muggy and humid, as great mists had begun to rise from the shock of fire where it struck near-frozen water. He would need to aim slightly higher, to accommodate the very thickness of it. 

The fletching tickled his mouth. 

Exhale. 

Inhale. 

“Loose!” he cried, with every ounce of fortitude he had left. 

The string slipped past his resin-slicked fingers. The arrow followed, bending slightly with the force, just as it should. His final black arrow, the last remaining parcel of his meager inheritance. 

As ever, it flew true. 

It did not catch upon any of the now-soaring flames that grew higher and higher over the only home he had ever known, and which now grasped with desperately flickering fingers toward the smoke-filled sky. But his eyes followed it with certainty, regardless. It whipped through the stifling air, its expertly-crafted broadhead carving through steam and flying embers to reach its fateful destination, and there it pierced deep into the dragon’s heart. 

It was not alone, two other arrows from his companions also found their mark in its skin, but none were so well made as those which Bard had inherited, and only his disappeared entirely to strike a killing blow, lost in the meat and muscle of the dragon as it began to howl with rage and pain. 

“Bowmen!” Smaug cried, and his previous rumblings now succumbed to a roar that shook the long-rotted and recently-burned foundations of Esgaroth itself. “Curse you! May you burn! May all of your kind burn with you!” 

As the dragon made its terminal threats, the fire that had begun to grow in its chest raged and crackled with such ferocity that what gold had been embedded in its skin began to melt and drip from it, to fall and sizzle on the ground below like drops of costly hellfire. And the dreadful beast reared back, as if to fulfill its promise. 

But in its rage and ranting, it denied itself the time, and its innermost light had hardly broiled to sit behind its lips before it seized, midair, and began to fall. 

Down, first upon a half-sunken dock just beyond them and the boats which were tethered to it, and then down further, as its enormous weight proved far too significant for ancient and unmaintained craftsmanship such as their town had always known. It slipped beneath the surface of the water with an enormous ripple that sent waves cascading in every direction, where eventually they would surely crash upon the shore. 

And so Bard watched, in the silent company of his troop, as the destroyer of their world sank lower and lower into the icy depths of the lake that had once been their home, until all that was visible was his final fire, which lay dying near his heart.

****** 

Thorin walked through the empty halls of Erebor, where the thunderous echoes of his shuffling footsteps reflected unmuffled back at him from every direction. 

Safe. They were safe, for now. Bilbo had called them for aid, though the entirety of the company had begun their descent long earlier, as the merest hints of sinister rumblings had begun to echo from far below. But the dragon had been long-since gone by the time of their arrival, regardless, and in the hours which had followed the crows of Erebor had returned, eventually bringing news of the accursed beast’s destruction.

And so Thorin walked now through the empty halls, but they were not empty to him. For how could they be? 

Even here, in the private chambers of the royal family, the hallways were simply cavernous. Long stretching eons of polished stone and the drooping remains of ancient tapestries towered above him in a way that would make anyone but a dwarf feel small. But their vastness could never threaten to swallow him, for he was hardly alone. 

There, in the corner, where the tattered remnants of an armchair rotted away, his mother sat – once, and still forever, bathed in the golden light of childhood – while she patiently braided his wet and tangled hair, and whispered stories of the kings that had come before him. 

There, through a distant open door that had long-since warped and wasted away, was his father, playing his grand harp with a grace and comfort that Thorin had only ever been able to envy. He sat, cross-legged and casual, on a decorative pillow – which would certainly get him an earful from his wife, if she caught him – and his normally smooth and pressed appearance was for once rumpled and stooped, as he focused on his music. And as he turned his gaze upward, he saw Thorin there looking at him, and he smiled, beckoning his eldest son to sit with him and rest from the duties of leadership for a moment or two. 

But before Thorin could find his feet and take even the slightest step forward there was Frerin, his beard short and unimpressive, and his braids ratty and falling out (for here in the halls of memory he was only a few decades old, and though he would never have the chance to truly age as he deserved, he hardly resembled the battle-weary and toughened version of himself that Thorin had been left to remember him by). Instead, he was carefree and young, and as he ran past his older brother he stopped and motioned as if to grab his hand, his eyes alight with mischief. Though he could not see her, Thorin knew somehow that the specter of their old nanny was chasing him with that big wooden spoon of hers, as Frerin had once again done something to upset her. The small, soft, and square hand that tried to take his own only passed through him, of course, for it wasn’t really there. But the expression on the face of this all-powerful idea of his little brother was one that was so certain they two would always escape any danger, as long as they stuck together, and Thorin couldn’t possibly deny even the mere memory of him the effort. He owed him so much more than only that. 

So he followed the little dwarf deeper into the now-abandoned chambers that had once been his home. And through the crumbling remains of walls, and in flashes between the shattered remnants of once-glorious pillars, he saw himself studying yellowing maps and ancient tomes with his old professors, a look of blatant boredom and childish annoyance on his young face. And as he continued on down the hall he found little Dis, begging him to sit in the fortress she had constructed so that he could be the citizen in distress, whom she would so bravely rescue from the top of a wicked wizard’s tower. And between them, passing from room to room with practiced ease, were the many servants he had once known by face if not by name, whose warm smiles welcomed him back. 

Glancing around, Thorin found that Frerin had long since disappeared back into memory – his last true resting place – and though he had never been real at all, it still hurt the king somewhere in that lonely corner of his heart that he was once again denied the chance to say goodbye. 

But ahead, spilling through the crack of a door that now hung - dusty and rotted - from a single hinge, there was a pale amber glow, and the sound of music. He walked toward it slowly, despite the urgent feeling that all of these small remnants of recollections were so impossibly fragile that they might pass on into nothingnesses once more at the slightest errant draft of wind. 

Even so, he approached with care, and now the sounds of his footsteps were masked entirely by the warm hum of friendly chatter, and the merry tinkle of fine glassware and beautiful jewelry as they gently collided. The noise did not grow louder at his approach, but rather only when he noticed it, and by the time he pushed aside the precarious entry-piece and entered the dark and abandoned reception hall he found that it was full of people, and full of light. 

Dwarf lords and ladies dressed proudly in all their finery danced spectacularly in circles all around him. And those who did not dance clapped, and looked at him joyfully, as if glad he’d finally joined them. A few gestured that he ought to partake in their conversations, or pointed him eagerly to the refreshments, where a truly spectacular array of sweets and finger foods – the likes of which he’d never have been able to appreciate, in these times before he’d become so familiar with the feeling of an empty stomach – were laid out in a way which made every option among them seem as wonderfully inviting and endlessly appetizing as the next. 

But then…. Was that Bombur, placing a new tray of sausages upon the already overloaded table? 

And was that Dori he saw out of the corner of his eye, standing on his tiptoes at the edge of the dance floor and glaring suspiciously at wherever it was that one of his brothers was up to no good? 

Surely not, for neither of them had any place in memories so distant… 

It was then that Thorin knew what he would see when he turned around, and yet he still so foolishly and eagerly did it, regardless. 

There was Bilbo, leaving a conversation with some unknown group of nearby dwarrow, a true smile still plain on his face. The little hobbit glanced about the room for a moment, as if missing someone, until he saw Thorin, and his grin turned somehow warmer and more inviting than it ever had been before. 

Thorin watched, dumbfounded and somewhat afraid of the fragility of the world around him, as this new vision approached him at a carefree pace, his small and round nose scrunching up slightly to one side as he likely considered whatever clever and teasing remark he’d like to greet the king with. 

And Thorin knew, of course, that this was no longer any memory of his. The Bilbo he saw in front of him was not the Bilbo he had first traveled with a lifetime ago. He was not the respectable Baggins of Bag End he had once met and so foolishly dismissed, nor was he the kindhearted and canny burglar he had grown to love in that first journey they had taken together. 

And he was certainly not the Bilbo he had traveled with these last few months, whose future he so feared, and whose unhappiness he had so often and so foolishly inspired. 

No, he recognized the hobbit before him, though he was no memory at all – or at the very least, no real one. This was the Bilbo Baggins he had once imagined for himself, in those days a long lifetime ago when simply wishing hadn’t felt like such a terrible and undeserved risk. This was the Bilbo that loved him back. 

The hobbit bowed grandly when he reached him, his smile now slightly sarcastic but still eternally warm, and rather than offering a cutting remark he simply offered his hand. Extended, palm up. 

And in this delicate and selfish fantasy that Thorin had conjured for himself, he knew that for the burglar it was a simple gesture. But starved as he was for any such expression of honest hope, to Thorin it felt like a promise. One which told him that this was a world in which it was not so impossible that the hand would be offered at all, and in fact it was a world when it might be offered often. 

He realized – then and only then, even after having mourned the fact for so long a time – that everything he had once loved in this place he now wandered was truly gone from him, and it would not be regained so easily as a dragon might be slain or a kingdom renewed. He knew then, as he cast his eyes around and caught the unmistakeable dust and decay, that even this room full of imagined people could not entirely shield him from the bitter knowledge that home was not simply a place to be rebuilt. His mother was gone, his father as well, and Frerin with them. Dis was no longer the sweet and stubborn child he had always sworn to protect, but was now instead her own dwarrowdam, who defended him just as fiercely as he ever had her. 

There was no returning to the comfort of the days before the dragon came, and though he may have reconciled himself to that fact in his mind, he found that it burned at his heart just as painfully in this moment as it ever had been before. 

And that was when he knew what must have happened to him. What familiar feeling surely conjured up these images and painted them in gold. He had not been tempted by the treasury, but temptation itself was not beyond him. 

He was flawed, horribly and uselessly flawed. In such a deep and significant way that were he a jewel there would be no bothering to cut around his defects, and he would be discarded altogether. 

He wanted it all, so badly. All of this. So much more deeply than he had ever wanted the Arkenstone, and more desperately than any endless expanse of gold he could ever imagine. It was a want so terrible it could hardly be borne, and it seemed to threaten to wrench him apart at the chest in a way he could not possibly hope to evade or even explain. 

It had to be that his madness had returned. Surely, it must be. There was nothing else that could hurt him so horribly. 

He had hoped to fight the sickness off - had thought that he had, even, when he had entered the treasure-halls of Erebor and felt little else but concern for the safety of his friend. But his weaknesses were not so easily conquered, and he should have known better than to think that his success on one battlefield would not mean his failure on another. 

He knelt on the cold and dusty stone floor then, one of his hands gripping uselessly at his ribcage above his heart as he half wished he could tear the thing out and be done with it. And as he bowed his head, his long hair shielded his face from the hundreds of dwarves that had never even been there, and from the little hobbit of his imagination whose hand had never been his to hold, so that none of them would see him cry. 

And so he sat there for a long while, alone in the vast room, which swallowed the sounds of his sobs and sniffles into the dark recesses of its nooks and crannies before spitting them back out to his unreceptive ears. And no matter how he tried to force himself to understand it, and to accept it, and to refuse to bow any longer to the terrible weight of it, he could not shake the knowledge that he had lived here once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very sorry for another slightly longer wait, unfortunately I'm a busy guy, but I gave you all 10,000+ words to make up for it. In other news, I've been getting some flack from some of you because you didn't take the slow burn tag THAT seriously. Should have warned you all up front: my favorite Austen is Persuasion... I watch the 2006 Mini-Series Jane Eyre because 2 hours doesn't cut it... I watch all of North and South every time and don't just skip to the train station scene.... I love a long long long extremely-repressed slow burn. That said, we're literally right about to get somewhere, I promise, just hold your horses.   
> On a related note: we've officially passed 100,000 words, making this the longest anything I've ever written! We've also passed the word count for The Hobbit... oops... I love going on about ridiculous details, sue me.   
> Anyway, last but not least, thank you as always for all the very very nice comments. Hope you're all safe and well


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this chapter, it was my birthday last week, which in adulthood somehow means you're even more busy than usual. As a hobbit-ish present for all of you on this special occasion, here is an absolutely ridiculously long chapter. It would have been reasonable to split it into two, I suppose, but there were certain things I wanted to happen here, and I wasn't going to cut them off just because of my own verbosity. It might be advisable that you split your reading into chunks, although with the number of messages I've gotten from people who have said they've read this entire story in a single night, that advice is probably falling on deaf ears...   
> Anyhow, I won't add notes at the end of this one, I'll let this chapter's conclusion speak for itself. So thank you, as always, to everyone who takes the time to write me such lovely comments.   
> Enjoy!

Night unfurled itself over Middle Earth like a jeweled blanket, and beneath the comforting constancy of its boundless infinity, the world slept. 

Not all of it, of course, for even in the darkest of days the simple irritations of living are not denied us. The planet itself may burn, but there will yet always be room to sleep on one’s arm wrong, or for too much coffee to be had far too late in the day, or for the need to relieve oneself to spring up right in the middle of the only wonderful dream to be had for miles upon miles and months upon years. Still, most of the world (more or the less) slept (or tried to), and so it came to be that this night – predicated though it was by death and despair – was just like any other. 

For just like any other, those who were awake and about to see it soon lost any sense of themselves in the depths of its pooling shadows, where not a single shaft of moonlight dared to pierce the gloom. On Middle Earth, you see, there are but two sorts who dare to move where midnight pours black and heavy between the gaps in ancient trees: those who navigate its silent expanses with a healthy fear of what strange and vile things might whisper within, and those who stride through the damp and chill with the confidence of being the whisperers.

Still, dawn followed reluctantly after dark, and so too did the sun peek carefully at the world with the same unrushed pace it always took. Far below it, still, the soggy corpse of a dragon lay bloated upon the rocky bed of an enormous lake – which boiled with its dying fire, as it would continue to do for days after, causing perch and eelpout to wash ashore fully-cooked. 

And only miles off, beneath the wind-whipped face of the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo Baggins had not slept a wink. 

This was, of course, enormously frustrating to the poor hobbit – for as far as he could tell, adventures were things comprised largely of the mundanity of missed meals, and sprinkled with discomfort in as many forms as could be mustered (which, he suspected, was why a year’s-worth of exploits could be easily retold in a single lazy afternoon). Truly, the most interesting thing that might happen to you on occasion – were you foolish enough ever to wander away from the comforts of home – was that someone might point the sharp end of something-or-another in your direction, which was almost never as thrilling in the moment as it later seemed with a warm cup in one hand and a captive audience near the other. Indeed, the only thing that could possibly hope to make such ordeals worse was to do them whilst unrested and enormously cranky about the fact, and yet his handy knowledge of the matter did little to force the cold stone floor upon which they had made their camp to become any more comfortable, or to quieten the cacophonous chorus of arrhythmic snoring that sounded from every direction around him (and which seemed to fill the cavernous halls of Erebor with as much ease as any number of wyrms). 

In truth, though, he knew rather well that what kept him awake was not the thundering bellow of echoing dwarven apnea, nor even was it the hard and frigid stone beneath his head – for he had suffered far worse in his many days, hobbit though he might have been, and he had never before found a surface to rest upon which he wouldn’t then be ornery to be parted from at the first irritating crack of dawn. No, rather what forced such frightful insomnia upon him was instead the slight and almost silent whisperings that had taken root in his heart from the moment he had plunged himself into Erebor’s abandoned misery, and which had refused to be parted from him since. 

“Did I not say that you would be a burden,” they chanted, in a voice so familiar it might nearly have been his own. “… that you had no place amongst us… I am betrayed, one of them is false…. 

“I am almost tempted to let you take it,” they continued, now mimicking the rumbling and reptilian hiss of Smaug, “… if only to see Oakenshield suffer… watch it destroy him… watch it corrupt his heart, and drive him mad…” 

Bilbo shuddered at hearing such dark and distant promises repeated, and the chill he felt with their recollection settled in his marrow with a certainty that no warmth could reach. He eventually concluded, however, that a few lungfuls of pipeweed could hardly hurt the matter, and so he crept carefully between the shadowy outlines of resting dwarves, and tiptoed into an adjoining hall – where the first tentative rays of sunlight softened the beautifully-carven stone walls in wonderfully erratic splashes of gold and pink, as they spilled from the cracked remains of a distant embrasured window and welcomed him kindly into the dawning morn. 

Aided by his expertise in all matters comfortable, Bilbo quickly and easily determined that the window itself would be the most suitable site for his repose, and so with very little fuss he was able to hoist himself upon its slightly-too-large dwarven proportions. After having done so with what spare grace he could manage, he leaned back against the warming stone, where he puffed away at one of the small helpings of awful dwarven pipeweed he had managed to secure by various means of pleading and haggling from his tasteless friends, and thereupon he observed calmly as the world discovered itself anew under the watchful eye of a fresh autumn sun. 

Somewhere, in a place not too distant from him, a lark began to whistle its merry tune, to which responded the friendly two-note call of a chickadee. A gentle wind – which drifted inward from the shattered remains of what appeared to once have been a lovely work of stained glass – carried their singsong greetings to Bilbo as he sat embroiled in the many sounds of natural silence, and it gently coaxed the absentminded rings of smoke aside as he exhaled them, to be replaced with the warm scent of earth, and a wet and woody aroma from the dew-soaked roots of whatever sparse shrubbery had already begun to stake its claim upon the tundra. 

And for a moment, everywhere, the world knew peace. 

“You could not sleep?” asked a voice, so familiar and soft that for an instant Bilbo might have believed he had conjured it himself. 

But when he turned, he found that Thorin was indeed there, and that the stern lines which had begun to crease his ever-more-silent visage from the moment they had entered into the halls he had once called home were, similarly, softened by the morning glow, with as much comfort and surety as was the stonework of his people. He looked, for a moment, like the dwarf Bilbo loved, with hardly a trace of the one whose impending appearance he so dreaded. 

Remembering that he had been asked a question, and that it was – in fact – rather rude to stare, Bilbo merely shook his head, unwilling to disturb the grace of the early morning with the modest mortality of his own voice. Thorin seemed to understand his silence, however, or at the very least he did not question it, and instead the king only met his gaze with a nigh-imperceptible tightening in his eyes. It was an expression that Bilbo recognized well, though he could hardly claim to truly know it. On anyone else, it would have been accompanied by a smile, but Thorin seemed hardly to relax as he looked upon him so, and really it could only be said that he was not frowning. 

Still, there was a sense of happiness about him when he looked that way, or at the very least some approximation of peace – which Bilbo suspected, given the tribulations of his long and bitter life, might have been a thing of even greater rarity. 

“Nor I,” Thorin replied, after a period of stillness had passed between them – broken only by the pleasant fee-dee of the whistling chickadee as it continued to greet the rising sun, and a gentle breeze which ruffled the fine hairs on Bilbo’s feet. 

The hobbit nodded sympathetically, and – not knowing what else to do to sustain the moment, but unwilling to let it end – he passed his pipe along to his friend, who took it with a grateful nod and sucked in an enormous lungful of its pungent and indelicate vapors, causing the bowl to glow and crackle with a dull reddish warmth that only illuminated the dark furrows beneath his tired eyes. 

“I thought you disliked our dwarven pipeweed?” Thorin asked, after attempting a wobbly sort of smoke ring of his own, which Bilbo quickly put to shame as the pipe was returned to him. 

“Oh I do, and make no mistake,” Bilbo assured him, before pointedly blowing out a second and third ring for good measure. “Still, there is little else for one with such refined sensibilities as my own to partake of in this wretched mountain of yours, o king, so I must simply make do. Horrible pipeweed is still the slightest improvement on no pipeweed at all, I have found.”

“Ah,” Thorin replied, as he leaned against the wall near to where Bilbo had turned to face him with an expression of reserved amusement. “You call my home wretched then, do you? Brave words indeed for someone who has put his dirty feet upon my sill.” 

The hobbit gasped with dramatic affront, and pulled away the pipe just as he had been about to offer it to his friend once more. 

“My feet are not dirty, you horrible dwarf!” he cried. “And if they are, it is through no one’s fault but your own! I’ve been dragged over hills and under mountains at your say-so, with hardly an offer of a bath to be found anywhere between them. And after what abuse they’ve been put through to reach this place, I think I am well within my rights to rest my soles upon it wherever I please…” 

“I fear you may be right,” Thorin conceded with a small chuckle, and at hearing his admission Bilbo gave the pipe over to his waiting hand. “You have my apologies, Master Burglar,” the king continued on, cupping the bowl of the pipe behind one large palm, to guard it against the insistent fingers of the morning breeze that swirled about them as he partook of another lungful. 

“The apologies of a king are an impressive thing indeed, I am sure,” Bilbo said teasingly, “and if I did not deserve twice as many as I have been offered I might be exceedingly more impressed with myself at having received them.” 

But rather than being some combination of amused and annoyed at his provocation, as Bilbo had expected, Thorin instead seemed rather stricken at the suggestion of any emotional debt between the two of them, and he appeared almost to wither in some small way at its very mention. 

“Again, my dear friend,” Thorin said of a moment, though his eyes were no longer on the hobbit in front of him, and had instead turned to gaze out into the small sliver of the world that was within his view, “I fear you may be right. Far more so than perhaps you know. I cannot…” he began – and though his countenance was once more still and solid, as always it could be relied upon to be, his expression became beseeching. Even so, he did not turn to face his companion, and instead directed his pleas for forgiveness to the distant earth itself. “… that is to say, I do not know… there is much I would ask your absolution for. Much which may yet require that I beg you for the opportunity of penance. I wish I could tell you even the half of it, truly…” 

He scowled then, seeming frustrated at something – though whether it was with himself, or with some unknown oppressor, Bilbo could not say. Still, the little hobbit did not like the look of it at all, and he was further becoming troubled at the odd familiarity of Thorin’s demeanor. There was something about it that was just a tad… or even the slightest bit…. something, perhaps to do with the vague allusions he provided regarding an indebtedness that was obscured to him. Or instead, maybe, something to do with the idea that there were tenors and facets to their affiliation that were not easily resolved with its recent and friendly development. Whatever it was, it scared him, in much the same way that it was ever-so-slightly frightening to encounter one’s neighbor in a place so very distant from home that your shared sociability was quite nearly forgotten. 

And there was something else, as well. A whisper, or perhaps merely even a tremor, which flitted into his mind like a leaf upon a delicate breeze – never meant to stay, but not so easily ignored. 

“No friendship of mine goes with him…” it called, the sound of it as fragile and frail as if it could be crushed at the very idea of its perishing. Even still, Bilbo did not banish the thought from his mind – for it was his own, after all, and he rather felt that it belonged there. “You have no claim over me, you miserable Shire-rat….. this gold is ours, and ours alone…. One of them is false…I am betrayed…” 

The words were whispered sweetly, perhaps even gleefully, almost as if their intention was one of kindness. But the phrases that were uttered with such soft and soothing emphasis still struck violently at the aching pain in his chest which had never healed in its entirety, even after years of weeping bitterly over its creation. 

“I wish I could tell you,” Thorin continued, and as Bilbo returned his attention to him in full he realized that the king had begun to look at him once more, and had even laid a hand lightly upon his arm – as if he were unsure of its welcome, but was yet unable to communicate whatever it was he would not speak of in any other way but to touch his companion and to know that he was real. 

“I am not the dwarf you must think me,” Thorin went on, seeming now almost insistent that he be heard, though yet uncertain what it was he wished to say. “I am incapable and flawed, and what’s more I am terribly aware of it. I have a great many fears, which cling to my heart in a wretched vice, shamed though I am to admit it. I must tell you, though, how ardently I wish…”

“Please, Thorin!” Bilbo interjected desperately, and though he did not notice it – distracted as he was – the fading remnants of the pipe they had shared were doused by a reckless wind, their ashes scattered and lost to the dust and soot that littered the ground. “Please, you must not say such things. I cannot bear to hear them.” 

Thorin quieted then, and only stared at him with an impassive expression, his chest rising and falling with every measured breath as he appeared to search Bilbo’s personage for answers that seemed as unknowable and frightening as the very questions the hobbit had himself.

None were asked, and none were given, and for a moment silence reigned heavy over them. Silence like no other, for it was the absence of something that was not just noise, just as surely as it was the formidable presence of something which ought not be spoken. 

A raven alighted on the outermost ledge of the window, then, and their quietus was lost – for with it arrived the gentle murmur of the growing wind, as it raked this way and that across the unyielding mountainside. 

“Roäc,” Thorin said solemnly, by way of greeting. “What news?” 

The raven looked at him plainly, before it shook a few errant droplets of morning dew from its rather large and menacing wings, a gust of air ruffling the agitated feathers of its neck with a force the bird didn’t even seem to notice. 

“Hail Thorin, son of Thráin,” it replied in a deep and throaty voice, its sharp and silver-scar-mottled beak clicking together as it formed words that did not come naturally to its race (the intimidating effect of which rather made Bilbo wish to put his fingers safely away in his pockets, though he stopped himself at the worry that to do so might be somewhat rude). “I have flown a great distance at your request, and have communicated your urgent entreaty to His Lordship Dáin.” 

Bilbo looked to Thorin curiously, wondering what pressing issues the king might possibly have conjured up before the impending threat of war had even begun to hint at befalling them. Certainly it had been a day or two after the death of the dragon when last he had sent word to his cousin, and to have received his messenger back now – so soon after daybreak, when Smaug had died after nightfall only hours previous – meant he surely must have dispatched the raven to the Iron Hills only shortly after it and its clan had made themselves known. It was a level of unprecedented confidence in their endeavors which made the hobbit feel leery and mistrustful, though he could not even say exactly why. 

“I thank you, Chief Roäc,” Thorin responded, not sparing Bilbo the slightest of glances even at receiving such a blatantly questioning look. “Your people have long been our allies, and you may rest assured that your loyalty will be amply rewarded in due time.” 

“Thank you, King Thorin,” Roäc croaked, its sharp talons clicking against the rough granite of the mountain’s exterior as it shifted from one leg to the other. “We the flock of Ravenhill are pleased with the return of the dwarves to Erebor, and the reclamation of our allyship alongside it.” 

Thorin nodded minutely, and it was with this small and measured gesture that Bilbo realized the dwarf had at some point diverted from the companionable warmth of friendship (with which he had already become re-accustomed) – to replace it, instead, with such harsh stoicism as regality required, and with such a swiftness that it had not even registered to the hobbit. He worried at it, for a moment, for surely such a severe transformation ought to have been more obvious to him, and he further wondered at having missed it. But he soon thereafter realized that the alteration had only been made in the manner which all significant changes seemed to. Occasionally, of course, they paraded into your life in some sort of grand way, like 13 dwarves falling in a pile on your front porch and begging to you to drop everything and slay a dragon with them. But more often than that they didn’t even have the decency to announce themselves. Instead, they happened in the background as you went on living your normal life, and you might not even have realized anything had occurred at all if it weren’t for the newfound feeling that you missed somewhere you’d never even realized you’d left.

It was a feeling he encountered even now, as he looked at Thorin with a small sliver of fresh understanding, and realized that the sternness of his countenance was only an act – one born of the rightful reservations that accompanied being raised as he had been, and given such responsibilities as he was. It was an act of defensiveness, which surely implied the presence of some form of fear. Thorin was afraid. 

This oughtn’t have shocked him as much as it did – especially when he had shared in the king’s perils twice over, and was well familiar with the immediacy of impending dread as it was spread equally amongst their company like a rising tide. But this strange and subtle fear was a singular and silent one, conjured only in his friend’s mind. It was not borne on the back of anything so obvious as a warg, and it was one from which he was to be defended entirely alone.

Stranger, still, was the recognition that this expression upon his face was not a new one. Bilbo had seen it before – had encountered it incessantly throughout their journey, in fact. He had inspired it himself, on many an occasion, for it was the same look that Thorin had given him a multitude of times when he had attempted to make himself overfamiliar with the dwarf in the days when the scarcest idea of friendship was still well beyond them. It was also the same fiercely impassive expression he had seen on that terrible evening in the Misty Mountains, when the king had attempted to banish him back to his hobbit hole and as far away from their party as could be managed.

It seemed, then, that evidence may suggest that Thorin was, in fact, afraid of Bilbo. Or had been, at least, though to what purpose or with what inspiration he could not begin to fathom. Though he did not doubt his own accomplishments, the burglar was still perfectly aware that his outward appearance was perhaps amongst the least threatening ever to have trod upon the earth – a point which Thorin had made certain to remark upon when first they had met. 

But had he, actually? Had he this time, that was? Bilbo found that he could not remember, and he suddenly wished that he could abandon this conversation, which he was apparently obliged to witness, and could instead slip away somewhere hidden and safe to open up his little notebook and search for any details he might have jotted down after their renewed meeting. His hand went absently to his pocket, where his Ring was tucked safely away, and he was very nearly tempted to put it on and vanish from sight in order to satisfy his curiosity… 

But manners won out, as they always did, and instead he merely returned his attention to the exchange at hand. 

“… quite decimated,” the raven insisted in its gravelly voice, the long and fur-like feathers upon its back standing up once more to accent the great urgency and emphasis with which it spoke. “Hardly a quarter of their army remained, and all of them badly burned.” 

“And the pale orc?” Thorin whispered, quick and desperate. 

Bilbo looked up, suddenly alarmed at what he might have missed, to find that Thorin had turned his attention to him once more – his gaze now more plainly guarded, and almost mistrustfully careful. 

“I could not say with any certainty, I fear,” Roäc replied. “I caught no sight of him, but I cannot pretend I lingered at their camp a moment longer than was necessary. Most civilized denizens of our earth do not eat my kind, but orcs have no such aversion.”

Thorin scowled, and he looked outward once more to where the fog of morning had begun to rise upward to escape the warming earth, as it clung and drifted amongst the dense foliage of distant forests.

“Is there nothing else you can tell me?” he demanded, his voice as low and cold as the very ancient corridors it now commanded. 

“Nothing regarding the orc armies, I regret to say,” Roäc replied. “I did, however, catch sight of a black rider in the forests not far distant from us upon my return. He was astride a foul and bloody horse, which looked to be a perversion of those ridden by the Rohirrim. Though again, I did not linger, and thus I speak with no conviction on the matter.” 

“It appears there are a great many dangers we must face,” Thorin said darkly, now possessed of a startling stillness. “Some, perhaps, more obvious than others. I thank you, Roäc. My greetings to your people.” 

Roäc, being a bird of great intelligence even amongst its perspicacious species, recognized the dismissal for what it was, and seemed glad to take its leave of them with one great flap of its enormous wings. And thus it soared further and further away, until distance and the jutting ridges of the mountain itself obscured it. 

And still, Thorin did not move. 

Bilbo similarly sensed that the moment they had shared had come and gone, and he tapped the lingering ashes from his pipe with an awkward finality. The sun had left its convenient position without so much as a sign of its departure, and where only moments ago it had thawed the stone around him he found that his enclave had once more grown cold, and it stole the heat from his body with a greedy hunger that the growing discomfort in his heart managed to make disturbing. 

“What did you do?” Thorin whispered finally, and almost angrily. 

“What did I do… when?” Bilbo asked in a plain sort of voice, as he stuck a finger in the bowl of his pipe to wipe it clean (though truthfully this was more necessary to abate his unaccountable nervousness than for any illusion of a tidiness which he had long since abandoned). 

“With the dragon,” Thorin replied gruffly, as if this ought to have been obvious to him. “With the orcs. They were meant to come… That is, by Roäc’s reckoning, a large army was mere days from us. Or would have been, were they not nearly decimated by dragonfire.” 

“And you believe that to be my fault?” Bilbo demanded, now tucking the pipe safely away in his favorite right-hand pocket, where all his best things belonged. “No, wait,” he paused, now leaping to the ground from where he sat, to approach their argument on equal footing. “First I must ask why it is that you seem to find offense in being spared the impending horror of what would surely have been a bloody battle. If this is something to do with your confusticatable dwarven honor, and your absolutely bebotherable obsession with warfare, I must warn you that I will refuse to hear it!” 

“It is not for my honor that I fear!” Thorin exclaimed angrily. “It is, I – it is not how things were meant to be done. I cannot guarantee your safety-”

“Nor would I ask you to,” Bilbo interrupted sharply. “Your wishes in this regard were made plain from the beginning, so you ought not suggest that you are bound in honor to protect me.” 

“Yet I am,” Thorin insisted. 

“You are not!” Bilbo cried. “You are not, and you cannot be! I have come along on this journey to secure you your kingdom, and there is little that is further required of you in our tale than that you sit upon its throne for as many long days as you can possibly manage. Yet you demand that there must be some terrible war, and so soon after your home has been bitterly won! Is it for glory? Was the death of a dragon not enough for you?” 

“Of course not!” Thorin insisted again, his voice raising. “I have not want for glory! Nor for riches, nor assets, for I have in the turn of a fortnight become possessor of a great deal more than any dwarrow may ever find use for, no matter how our kind might covet them. Truly, I want for nothing, save the company of those I cherish, and that is what you threatened to steal from me when you spoke to that damnable wyrm,” he spat. “You must have done. How else would it have come upon the idea that such a portent of orcish armies was on its horizon?” 

Bilbo sat silent, unsure of how to answer when the quarrel he had thought he was having was so swiftly replaced with another. Instead he frowned, and gathered his thoughts – a decision which had the unfortunate consequence of allowing Thorin the same opportunity. 

“How, for that matter,” Thorin added slowly, his eyes narrowed with searching suspicion, “did you?” 

A singular moment passed in which Bilbo considered telling him everything – for he felt rather like a cornered rabbit, and had done from the moment he had entered into this dratted place. It was not Thorin he feared, after all – or at the very least it was not this Thorin, nor any version of the dwarf which could be rightfully considered to be truly him. 

But as Thorin stepped slowly closer, his narrowed gaze whipping sharply this way and that over him as if somewhere between them there must be some sign of Bilbo’s answer, the contents of his pocket rattled woodenly together. And though they did not sound very much like gold or jewels – nor anything of great size or value, truthfully – Bilbo still felt an angry certainty take root in his heart which assured him the king’s wretched hoarding had begun. 

“I will not be parted from it,” whispered a voice who was not the Thorin in front of him (or at least, it was not yet). “Not one coin…” 

Perhaps it was the quivering and unshakeable voice of Fate, Bilbo considered. Or perhaps it was only his heart. 

Or perhaps… 

“Answer me, Burglar,” Thorin demanded, though his face softened with something like regret with nearly the instant the words passed his lips. “Bilbo,” he amended, “what did you do?” 

“Nothing,” Bilbo replied coolly, and as he stepped backward and away from his friend the king stopped himself in his approach, seeming almost to shy away from their closeness with nearly as much fear as the hobbit would perhaps have been right to feel himself. (Though somehow he did not, for at some unknown point in the previous few minutes he had ceased to feel anything of value that was not anger and suspicion – and indeed, all that was good in the world had become similarly obscured from him, with such force that the view from the window he had so recently admired might as well have boarded up, and have plunged them both into darkness.)

“Nothing at all, Master Oakenshield,” Bilbo repeated caustically. “It is apparently not enough that I have crept through shadows to observe the dragon beyond your doorstep, nor even that I survived to tell the tale. It would seem I am now to be held responsible for the errant behavior of every vile creature we might encounter.” 

“Not so-” Thorin began, but Bilbo was not quite finished with him. 

“No, do tell me, o king,” the hobbit bickered, “am I also to be blamed for the fact that it took your mountain from you in the first place? I was not yet alive at the time, nor even were my parents, but I am sure you can conjure up some idea of your every loss being my burden if only you put your impardonably rude mind to it.” 

This was a great deal too far to have gone, and for a great many reasons. Indeed, a small part of Bilbo felt enormously regretful at having said it. But he would not back down now, here where the road ahead was dark, and he was to travel alone. He could allow no one victory over him, when his actions henceforth were of such great and terrible import. 

“Of course not,” Thorin said – and in the quiet of their distant and solitary regrets his face had fallen blank, as his tone no longer betrayed anything but dispassion. “I would not wish that you be weighed down by troubles that are so solely my own, and I must apologize for any affliction my affection may have caused you. It was unconsciously done.” 

“No, Thorin,” Bilbo began, as he suddenly felt the desperate need to banish the expansive rift that had begun to stretch between them even as they stood in utter stillness (for he realized, then, that their friendship was of multitudinously greater importance to him than his own anger, and in fact he could not imagine why on earth it had ever felt otherwise). “I am sorry, I did not mean that. Truly I didn’t. I have been glad to share in your perils, each and every one of them.” 

These words, though not spoken for the first time – from Bilbo’s perspective, at least – caused Thorin’s frigid stoicism to falter for a brief hint of a moment, and thus encouraged the hobbit continued on. 

“I cannot imagine the feeling of watching the only home you have ever known being so definitively burnt and ravaged, nor will I pretend to understand it,” the hobbit said. “But I do know pain, and I do know loss. I dare say I know it as well as if it were a very part of me, for it seems become so, though I’m sure I needn’t tell you that. No loss that matters ever happens just the once. It is… The heart is an unruly thing, I think. The mind too, and perhaps the whole of us, but the heart alone dares to make promises it cannot keep,” he laughed bitterly. “What I mean to say, though apparently at length, is that…” and here Bilbo stopped, for he couldn’t be entirely sure what it was he had wanted to express, only that something inside him would not be held captive a moment longer. 

“I understand,” Thorin replied, and though the quality of his tone had not changed from the smooth and unstuttering neutrality he had assumed, there was something in his countenance which seemed weighted down and full of grief, which was entirely the opposite of what Bilbo had meant for. 

“No, no,” Bilbo pressed on, incautious in his desire to be heard and understood, even when he did not know what it was he wished to say. “I only meant to tell you that… I am sorry for what I said, and I regret that I made light of your sorrow when the fealty of friendship suggests that it is also mine to bear. You lost your home, and even your world, in some way. And I merely wish to assure you that I understand if your world still burns, even now.” 

“Thank you, my friend,” Thorin replied softly – his expression unreadable, though this was not for any lack of feeling to be found upon it. “Perhaps you are right, and perhaps it does. Though nothing more than I.” 

****** 

The initial bout of negotiations in the coming days went as splendidly as could have been hoped for by any party involved in them – which is, of course, to say: they went. No unprecedented groundwork for eternal peace and prosperity was laid out (though this was just as well, for such an occurrence would have bored certain meddling wizards quite to tears, and the very fires of Mordor hath no fury like a member of the Istari experiencing some small modicum of tedium). Even so, many words were exchanged in the meetings that followed, some of which were even polite. And though Thorin was not so trusting as to leave the safety of his homestead entirely, it was considered a gesture of some significant goodwill by the other two members of their parley that he met them in front of his newly-built gates with as much grace and civility as might have been expected – which is, of course, to say: very little. 

Now, it is a fact now well-known to you and I that the various races of Middle Earth take great pride in their refusal to see eye-to-eye on anything (including, in some instances, the proper way to see eye-to-eye, where smaller folk would demand that taller beings ought to stoop, and taller beings tended to insist there was no dwarf or hobbit who ever died from craning their neck). Still, the very nature by which they tended to express their disagreements was, in fact, remarkably similar, for in most every situation but a tavern brawl it tended to first be preluded by some illusion of diplomacy (and in this, at least, they were able to express their individuality to some degree). Almost invariably thereafter, however, diplomacy turned to displeasure, which soon became discord, which thence transformed into downright disagreement, which often became death-to-the-very-thought-of-you-and-may-rats-choke-upon-your-remains. It was at this point that their approaches to argument itself tended to become quite nearly tantamount to each other – consisting, as they did, largely of being louder than the other person, while steadfastly ignoring anything they might happen to be saying. 

Regardless, in this instance the dwarves, elves, and men had the enormously good fortune of remaining relatively peaceable, with nary a threat posed to the past or future lineage of any diplomatic member to be found within the grand and silken elven tent that had been swiftly erected for their purpose. And so it was that Bard, King of Dale, Thranduil, King of the Woodland Realm, and Thorin son of Thráin, King Under the Mountain, were to be found convening regularly, with purpose and even on purpose, though they were as greatly surprised by such a turn of events as was any other. 

Unfortunately, public relations are remarkably like games of sport, in that they become exponentially less interesting on the rare occasion that they are done correctly. And so we will linger no further on the subject than to say that Thranduil, of course, insisted he be given far more than he was rightfully owed, and Bard, of course, was enormously leery of any agreement which might allow advantage to be taken of his frightfully vulnerable folk, and Thorin, of course, was not to be swayed by elegant words or well-phrased entreaties in the least (though the impending urgency imposed by what remaining members of Azog’s army yet bore down on them – flanked by the intact legions of the orcish general Bolg as he led them eastward from Gundabad – managed to serve as a cure to this affliction in some small measure). 

Days passed in this odd sort of manner, and it was with nigh as much triumphant bitterness as with frustration that Thorin soon recognized that their friendly negotiations had done little more to secure their mutual allyship for the coming battle than had his first ill-conceived approach. Even after the white gems had been promised to the elvenking, and shelter, work, and trade promised to the men of Dale, the enormous minutia involved in agreeing on something in such an official way only further divided their already-entrenched estrangement, and before long he began to feel that if their arbitrations continued on so smoothly it was very possible that none of their kingdoms would ever be in contact again from the signing of their treaty onward. 

His responsibility in the matter – paired with the odd and almost-forgotten feeling of the future approaching him like a wild horizon, beyond which he had not the faintest idea what prospective perils may lie – weighed heavily upon him as the days trudged on with a weary fortitude he found familiar, and his spirits were little helped by his conscious and unhappy decision to spend his waning hours of independence in strict solitude. He feared his own emotions, perhaps more with every passing day than he had in the hours previous, and the greatest balm upon his heart – it seemed – was to stifle it entirely with the vast expanse of grim and ghastly seclusion. 

It appeared, however, that his efforts toward avoidance were largely unappreciated by the one whose safety had most inspired them – for at their every rare encounter, Bilbo seemed to become increasingly suspicious of him, and indeed had even begun to search the king out as he wandered the yawning remains of what had once been a densely-packed and bustling city. His purpose in doing so was as opaque and inscrutable as ever the hobbit had been in any matter before (which was, in itself, a considerable measure), but he routinely asked after Thorin’s purpose in establishing such distance from their company, and with more and more frequency he had begun to inquire after the damn-ed Arkenstone, his questions colored by a painfully obvious façade of casual interest. 

These conversations were the worst of them all, for they invariably ended in the sort of row wherein much was spoken and little was actually said. This, in turn, had its own terrible effect on the already belabored beating of Thorin’s frail and tired heart. He did not know by exactly what magic it had been reinvigorated – for truly, there was no fully parsing the whims of the Valar, no matter how plainly they were expressed. But he felt the strain and ancient sorrow of age at the very core of it, as deeply as it permeated the rest of his unmerited being. He was not meant to have lived for so long, of this he had no doubt. 

It was after one such argument (wherein Thorin had begun to become suspicious of Bilbo’s interest in the accursed piece of stone, and had even asked after Bilbo’s own knowledge of its whereabouts with the half-formed fear that his little friend might have fallen under its dark spell) when the king was abandoned angrily by one esteemed companion only to be interrupted by another. 

“That might have gone better,” Balin’s warm brogue washed over him comfortingly, as his most trusted advisor climbed a great many steps to join Thorin where he sat upon one of the famed and now-crumbling silver fountains of his home. There they looked out through a set of ramparts just beyond as the wearily-fading light of day yielded its hard-won domain to the delicate grip of twilight. 

“It might yet have gone worse,” Thorin replied bleakly. His friend only nodded with the understanding wisdom that was the very hallmark of his character, and yet this small acquiescent acknowledgement of the value of his pain felt almost like a luxury to the poor king (for long had he stewed in it and reviled himself for it alone). 

They shared the noiselessness between them companionably, and for a whole of a moment it was parted only by the calm rush of springing water – which had long since abandoned the ruined remnants of the fonts that had been crafted to guide it, and had instead carved its own paths that played through the endless and empty expanse of a city which was built to be filled by much more than silence, before dashing toward the rampart’s edge and escaping down the mountain itself in great sheets of mist. 

“I cannot fathom of why it is that poets seem so taken with love,” Thorin spoke at last. “It is nigh unendurable.”

Balin only nodded once more, and Thorin – well-acquainted with the careful and intentional conversational style of his oldest friend – allowed him a peaceful moment to gather his thoughts. 

“I can understand why you might feel so,” Balin said at length. “You are even right, for now, impermanent though your sentiment may be. To love is a gift, to love and do nothing is an impossibility. For you, in fact, I rather think to do nothing in any context is an impossibility…” 

And here he turned to Thorin, his wrinkled eyes sparking merrily with an ever-familiar combination of amusement and exasperation, which had often been his response to conversation with the king on any subject, even from their youngest ages. 

“You are a dwarf of action,” he continued on, “yet in this of all matters you stay your hand. I cannot imagine why, but I doubt that it has done you much good.” 

Thorin scowled, slightly, though he could not gather the will to disagree with such an offense when it was so kindly meant and truthfully spoken. 

“The heart is a fickle and foolish thing,” he replied instead, in a voice so soft and deep that he himself could hardly hear it over the soft refrains of rushing water, nor could he scarcely recognize it as his own. “I cannot afford to trust my own. Not when wisdom is firm, and so definitively defies it.”

Balin laughed, and with such mirth that he startled the king for a moment, and caused him to worry that he might have been misheard. 

“Oh, what nonsense that is,” the old dwarf responded good-naturedly, after a moment of cheer. “It’s quite the opposite. How else could it be that the passage of time might wipe the memory of a person from your mind so cleanly that even their face may one day be obscured from you, yet it is your heart which never grows tired of missing them? Did you know, I quite forgot my mother’s name the other day, and I very nearly had to ask my brother for it before it came to me all of a sudden. Still, I cannot eat lamb without wishing it were made by her recipe, and every sunrise I see seems hardly more than a gentle shadow of the warmth she once brought me. She brings it to me still, though she has been gone a century yet. Love is not a physical thing. It is not so frail. And though you may deny it to your dying breath, the only thing which has nary a hope of dominion over your heart is, in fact, you.” 

This was the very sort of florid phraseology for which advisors of kings were often infamous, and yet – as was always the case, where Balin was concerned – Thorin was deeply begrudged to admit that he could not find fault with his reasoning. 

“Forgive the assumption if I am false, my king,” Balin continued on, without expectation of an answer (for he was as familiar with Thorin’s style of conversation as was the reverse), “but you should know that your tacit avoidance of the grand treasure rooms you have only so recently inherited has not gone unnoticed. I believe I may be right in assuming that you fear the sickness which felled your grandfather?” 

Thorin nodded, and Balin hummed in understanding. 

“You will remember, then, that I was witness to it too,” the old dwarf said. “We are not so very far apart in age, much as you prefer to forget that fact. Still, I watched his decline with the advantage of a few decades which, at so young a time, can make all the difference. And in truth, I must admit I once dreaded the same from you. Not from any idea of your weakness, you understand, but rather because I feared for your fierce commitment to strength.” 

Here he paused, in the very way Thorin well knew indicated that he was not finished talking, but rather that he meant to say something of importance, and further meant to say it right. 

“You must know, though, Thorin,” Balin said at last, “you… changed, suddenly. And though I cannot say quite how, I will admit to my suspicions regarding the source of its longevity.” 

“And what are they?” Thorin was obliged to ask, though he could not anticipate the answer. 

“Bilbo,” Balin replied simply. “Your strangeness began just before your meeting, and I cannot pretend to understand your motives for it. But it was not until our burglar was introduced to us that the true tenor of your altered heart became clear. It is as I said once before… You are changed, Thorin.” 

The words were spoken gently, and yet the earnest shock of hearing them uttered – without judgment or fear, as once they had been – pierced the lowly king in a gut-deep and terribly raw sort of way.

Balin did not notice this though, distracted as he now was by his own thoughts and the vague and distant view of gathering starlight. And so he continued on, without pause: 

“I would not claim to ever having considered you to be unkind or injudicious,” he clarified with calm assuredness. “But it was the care you took with the hobbit, much as you meant to conceal it, that convinced me of your evolvement. Much as we all hold him in high regard, he was the least among us. And though you were regrettably clumsy in your unfamiliarity with its expression, those of us who know you best recognized of an instant that you held him at a higher value than anything you had ever held before.”

“How could I not?” Thorin asked solemnly, for even as he regarded Balin’s opinion above almost all others, he was still little convinced of his friend’s rightness in this instance. “I was made to love him. The very footsteps that bore him toward the door of his smial where I waited to know him were echoed by the beating of my heart. You cannot call a fountain good for being a fountain, it can do little else.” 

“You act as if every act of creation is a success. Perhaps you have forgotten that I was there to watch your efforts toward mastery in metalsmithing, and I know quite well that you are more than aware that this is hardly the case,” Balin pointed out with a shrewd smile. “See here, where the very keystone of your argument is laid bare and made foolish. The fountains upon which we now sit are no longer fountains at all, by your reckoning, for in the face of great strain and ruin they are shattered. I would not go so far as to say they are not good, simply because once they were and now they are no longer, but that is beside the point. If you will allow me to explain your own perils to you, as I feel I am one of very few who may be permitted the honor, I would point out that you have faced such trials of your own, before and after you met our little friend. And if you were truly crafted to be his fiercest protector, you have not given the slightest sign of weakening in your resolve just yet.” 

“Perhaps… Though your logic is unsound,” Thorin remarked pettily (for again, he could not find fault with the point itself, and thus he could only guard against its structure as all who argue and are outmatched are wont to do). “First you tell me that I cannot control my heart, and then you tell me that to merely follow its directives might imply anything at all about my character.” 

“A fair point,” Balin conceded with a nod. “Still, you miss the larger issue, my king. Is it your heart at all? Or is it merely yours to give?” 

Thorin only grunted in response, for though he did not quite feel he had been bested in their debate, to be left without an answer was hardly a victory. 

“I will not insist that you agree with me, m’lad,” Balin added after a moment’s pause. “Only I will tell you that I, who have followed you from the beginning of all things, know the substance of your character, and I will not be persuaded of its infirmity. And so I must repeat, before the matter is closed, that I have seen dragon-sickness before, just as you have. It is a fierce and jealous love. The very fact that you so clearly fear for his sake more than your own, should it befall you, suggests to me that you have escaped its grasp.” 

It was a strange and dry sort of sob, which shuddered silently from Thorin’s ribs and outward like a winded breath when he heard the confidence of the very reassurance he had so desperately desired. Balin, kindly, pretended he did not notice the way his words had effected his friend so, and instead he only looked out into the billowing depths of yet one more night, as the stars that had once made promises of divinity to a dwarven king and his little hobbit visited upon them once more in grand clusters of brilliant light. 

And far below them, though not quite out of view, a solitary beacon navigated the treacherous dark, where the moon ducked low at the shores of the Long Lake and admired its waning face. The little hobbit might have himself appeared to be nothing more than a roving star as it fell from grace, as he held aloft the clear light of Eärendil, and carried the heart of the mountain far, far away from the silent and watchful king. 

“He will not return,” Thorin whispered. But Balin did not hear him, and he did not respond. 

******* 

Night was a terrible, awful sort of thing, Bilbo decided. 

(Of course, it had scarcely been a week before that when he was known to be utterly convinced that there was nothing more beautiful than to sit beside a cherished friend and watch the stars as they flitted into view – dancing behind the sheer and silky pink-and-purple veils of distant galaxies, and occasionally falling from the sky in great flashes of infinity. But he was having rather a difficult day, and the marshy slog beneath his frozen feet would have made anyone a tad grumpy, and so we will not mention this.) 

Indeed, there was, perhaps, even some merit to his complaints, cantankerously-constructed though they might have been. For beautiful as it can be, the night does rather seem to enjoy the tricks it plays on those of us who wander within it, and at the departure of dusk there is no great spectacle of scenery which is not then turned to a black and boundless desert. Worse, yet, has always been the way that in such sightless wilds (and no matter the turf or terrain upon which they had been spread), there seems to be an unending array of opportunities to stub one’s toe, or to step in something that squelches far too sinisterly to merely be mud. 

It was with this crotchety sort of testiness as his sole companion, and an unseemly amount of swampy clay on his poor feet, that Bilbo discovered himself to be very nearly relieved as the ostentatious and ornamental tents of the elvenking came into his view. Apart from the singular one that had been established at the foothills for the purpose of negotiation, they had been erected extraordinarily near to the distant line of dense and timeworn trees that skirted the Lonely Mountain, as if those who camped within them could no more bear to be parted entirely from their home than could the dwarven king whose demands they so joyously mocked. 

The decoratively-stitched canvases of wood-elves’ luxurious shelters were alight from within with a yellow and flickering glow, which made them appear almost as beacons of comfort in the damp and chilly bog through which he trudged, and a cool autumn breeze plucked their flaps open in a tantalizing sort of welcome. It could therefore hardly be considered Bilbo’s fault that upon his arrival he determinedly marched directly past the guards who watched the entrance of Thranduil’s own tent (which was, in truth, more of a splendid sort of yurt), and with very little thought toward the utter idea of a polite greeting he interrupted the small assembly that had gathered in its warmth. 

“Well then,” he announced himself brashly, “I see you have lost no time in conspiring against the dwarves whose riches you covet. What grand allies you make.” 

Gandalf and Thranduil, who had only a moment ago been hunched over an enormous map in the center of the room, regarded him each with their own unique expressions of poorly-masked surprise. Bard, however – from where he stood at a silent distance from them – did not seem shocked in the least, and in fact had been watching the door almost as if he waited for the hobbit’s arrival. 

Odd, and getting odder, Bilbo thought grumpily. 

“Welcome, Master Baggins,” the bowman greeted him, in his ever-stern and unshakable voice. 

“Bilbo!” Gandalf hailed him with greet cheer – as if he had, in fact, been similarly expecting the hobbit to appear, and had merely wondered what had taken him. 

This annoyed Bilbo considerably, for he was far too cold and far too tired to play a part for the sake of allowing the wizard his illusion of omniscience. Thranduil, however, appeared even more greatly irked at his tone, and generally seemed to be of the opinion that it was enormously rude of his two conspirators to have mutual acquaintanceship with someone he had not met, nor even ever heard of. 

“Who is this child, and why has he been allowed to wander so far from home?” the elvenking demanded imperially. 

(Bilbo was, of course, quite ready to give him a good chewing out for his impertinence, but Gandalf knew him far too well for that, and interrupted before he had half the chance.) 

“This is Master Bilbo Baggins, of the Shire,” the wizard said with a genial smile. “Surely you have not entombed yourself in the caverns of your kingdom for so long a time that you’ve forgotten the hobbits themselves? Our young Bilbo here is even an elf-friend, so named by Lord Elrond, your kinsman.” 

“Ah,” Thranduil replied pointedly, as if to convey the idea that he had known this all along, and that Gandalf were – in fact – the fool for having stated the obvious. “I have had the pleasure of knowing a handful of halflings in my time, which I consider a great accomplishment given the reclusive nature of their folk. My question still stands, however. Why has he wandered so far from home?” 

Gandalf made to answer this inquiry as well, but Bilbo had heard quite enough of his diplomatic dithering already, and felt it was far too late in the evening for any of them to bother with saying anything that was not exactly what it they meant. 

“He,” Bilbo interrupted with annoyance, “is not a halfling, but a hobbit, as any who truly know our kind will be able to tell you. He is also in this very room, and more than capable of speaking for himself. Now, shall I repeat my own question? Why do you so secretively conspire, when negotiations go well?” 

Thranduil’s ethereal expressionless took on a pinched sort of overtone at his brashness – as if it were distasteful even in a physical way, and the bitterness of such speech directed so boldly toward him was a bane lashed upon his delicate tongue. 

“We do not conspire, halfling,” the elvenking replied, with as much cool languidness as ever he intoned. “I merely meant to take advantage of Mithrandir’s insights into matters concerning my kingdom, when Captain Bard here took it upon himself to enter into our assemblage without cause or explanation.” 

“King Bard, I think you’ll find,” Gandalf corrected, for what certainly could not have been the first time. 

The king himself hardly reacted to Thranduil’s childish aggravations, and instead merely turned his gaze back to Bilbo without a trace of apology to be found in his countenance. 

“I felt confident that my presence would be of some use here before the night was out,” the man said plainly. “It seems I was right. What is it you bring us, Master Baggins?” 

“Oh, right,” Bilbo replied, and he was quite tired enough that he forgot to wonder just how it was that the bowman knew he had brought anything at all. Instead, he merely plucked the dratted Arkenstone from his left breast pocket, and placed it without apology atop the elegant map which had so recently been the focus of their convention. 

“The Arkenstone,” Thranduil whispered with an unhindered reverence that made the very pit of Bilbo’s stomach turn in disgust. “The heart of the mountain…”

“Isn’t it just,” Gandalf agreed rather unnecessarily, and he then looked at Bilbo with open amusement. 

It was a beautiful thing, to be sure, in much the same way that the stars were beautiful when they were not the faded and useless light that led one astray as they were traveled beneath. Still, its brilliant refractions of glowing color, sourced apparently from the root of the foul jewel, danced dizzyingly across the yellowed sheets of canvas that surrounded them, and Bilbo could admit that it was – if nothing else – a fine thing to look at (much as he would vastly prefer to never do so again).

“The king’s jewel,” Thranduil continued on, seemingly prepared to believe Gandalf had not spoken at all if what he said was of no benefit to him. Then, suddenly, his divine expression grew ever-so-slightly dark. “And worth he king’s ransom,” he added. “Why would you bring us this? What dwarvish plan do you enact?” 

Once again, Bilbo was prepared to defend himself with great affront. But this time it was Bard who so surprisingly interrupted him. 

“You do not do this for us, do you Master Baggins?” he asked, in the sort of tone that well implied he already knew the answer. “Though neither do you do it at the dwarves’ request. You come for them, not of them.” 

Gandalf turned his shrewd and speculative eye to the King of Dale, whilst he lit his long and wonderful wizard’s pipe with the tip of a crooked finger, and began to puff away at it to create a cloud of intrigue which swirled near the jaunty tip of his hat. 

“And how is it that you know our dear hobbit so well, King Bard?” the wizard asked, seeming certain that the answer would greatly amuse him. 

“That is an inquiry that he alone may answer for you,” Bard replied firmly, to his own great credit. “It is not my story to tell, for I contributed little more than a verse to its creation.”

“Why do we divert from the matter at hand to focus on such small details of no great importance?” Thranduil demanded (with such inflection as made it rather clear just which details amongst them he considered small and unsalable). “What is your purpose in bringing us this token, when you yourself have remarked that our sluggish negotiations have thus far succeeded?” 

“I did it because,” Bilbo began, quite before an appropriate answer had been conjured into his ever-more-muddled mind. He was, of late, finding himself more and more susceptible to becoming lost in the murky and fathomless mires of his unconscious thoughts, for it was a hard enough thing to keep track of just what it was he was supposed to know and what little of this he might actually permit himself to tell, but even beyond that there was some dismal fog of… of… 

He looked up, then, and discovered that he had done the very thing he had only meant to consider – for he did not know how long he had stood silent before the three of them, only that they now watched him without interruption (surprising and uncharacteristic though this was), and upon each of their faces was a countenance of confusion or concern, in whatever mixture was appropriate. 

“Because,” he began again rather firmly, “I care about those dwarves, each and every one of them. Pig-headed and difficult they may sometimes be, and insufferable and oafish to boot. And the manners on them, oh dear…” he trailed off for a moment to emphasize this rather important point, and at his doing so a small amount of the previous mirth returned to Gandalf’s eyes. 

“Still,” he carried on, “they are loyal to me, and I to them. And thus I fear the spell that this horrid thing would cast over their hearts. It whispers in a language which only they speak, and it calls them to the pleasureless gleam of gold until they very well may lock themselves away in their mountain without a care for the world beyond it! They gild their own tombs!” he cried, becoming more and more frantic at the thought of their horrible fate, and his own feeble attempts to free them from it. “Even now, their king withdraws, and oh, but I worry for him! I worry for the lot of them. They search high and low throughout their cavernous coffers, in the hopes that to unsurface this hollow ornament will draw him back, but it cannot help! It will not!” 

“My dear Bilbo,” Gandalf said with alarm, “what a state you are in! Are things really so terrible beneath the mountain? I had not gathered such an impression in our meetings thus far, or I might have intervened!” 

“They are not, yet,” Bilbo replied carefully, ignoring the curious look Bard sent in his direction. “But they may be soon. I am quite nearly sure of it.” 

“The nature of a sunset is such that in the brilliance of the light you hardly notice the shadows which grow behind you... So, too, grows evil.” Thranduil remarked sagely, in such a way which Bilbo considered to be most enormously unhelpful. 

Gandalf, however, merely hummed his response in the wonderfully vague way which only wizards could manage. Either he meant to impress upon them his deep admiration for Thranduil’s well-spoken wisdom, or rather perhaps he agreed with Bilbo’s harsh assessment of the king’s character – there was truly no saying. But it satisfied the elf and the hobbit equally, and amused the man, and in so doing the Istari had largely served his purpose without much fuss or effort, which was in itself commendable. 

“I do believe,” the old conjurer said after a period of contemplative silence had passed, “that the construction of a plan of some sort may now be in order. First, however, I would like to speak with my friend.” 

Here, he gestured at the tent-flap, and it was a testament to his prestigious and near-ubiquitous merit that both kings – fond though they were of disagreeing with the wizard – heeded this dismissal, one even from his own encampment. 

When at last their royal presence was relinquished, and the many guards that ever accompanied them had stood outside at audibly-rushed attention to greet their unexpected departure (and had followed at their heels to where they surely conspired yonder), Gandalf rounded on poor Bilbo with a sternness that did not match his earlier joviality in the least. 

“Now, then,” the sorcerer started in with little warning, his wrinkled eyes narrowing with further judiciousness. “You have been keeping secrets, Bilbo Baggins. Imagine my surprise at discovering that the odd and amusing little hobbit I encountered in the Shire was, in fact, a delinquent from death itself.” 

“I… what?” Bilbo stuttered nervously, as he began to wonder if Bard’s earlier display of trustworthiness had been nothing but an act for his benefit. 

“Oh yes,” Gandalf said with keen and nearly-gleeful dramatacism. “I had only just arrived at the High Fells, in my quest for something which… No, come to think of it, it is none of your business. Regardless, I had hardly stepped foot into that treacherous tomb when I was visited upon by my good cousin Radagast, whose presence I had not been expecting, and whose unceasing insistence that he had not encountered you in the woods near his house, despite my never having inquired after such a thing, went a good long ways in reassuring me that you had, in fact, survived that horrible fall you took in Goblintown. Now then, what do you have to say for yourself?” 

“Oh dear me, Oh… Oh, Gandalf,” Bilbo sobbed – and he was as surprised as the wizard in front of him at the arrival of a few errant tears on his cheeks, which he rid himself of with the use of one of the lovely handkerchiefs he had purchased from the Lake-town market (which was now little more than ash set adrift in a boiling inland sea). Already, he had lost more than one of them to the grime and ruin of living as he did, but what kerchiefs remained of his set had managed to bring him more joy and comfort than almost anything else had in the bleak and pitiless days he had so recently experienced. 

And – as if realizing the needs of his friend at the arrival of such a clear beacon his distress – Gandalf then leapt to action, and placed a comforting half-mittened hand upon the poor hobbit’s shoulder. 

“There, there, my dear fellow,” Gandalf reassured him kindly, adding a few absent pats to his soothing hold as was only appropriate in such a situation. “I did not mean to upset you, I merely meant to express how overjoyed I am at finding you alive, and well enough to be upset at all. Please, do gather yourself, I hate to see you so…” 

Bilbo sniffled spitefully, and blew his nose with an energetic and vigorous caterwauling which caused the wizard to withdraw his hand and glare in offense at his disgusting display. Served him right, Bilbo felt, for distressing him so. 

“If you have quite finished,” Gandalf then added, eyeing the sodden handkerchief warily, “I must point out that there are other matters which ought to be discussed before the night is out. You will no doubt be embittered to learn that dear Radagast also made it quite clear that he had been told no secrets by the specter of you that never did visit him. And, further, that were I to encounter you in this waking world, which I never would, I oughtn’t bother to ask you about them. I believe you had the misfortune of confiding in the one inhabitant of this earth who is so widely open a book he is quite nearly closed the other way ‘round.” 

“Drat and confusticate that Brown Wizard,” Bilbo muttered with ornery regret. 

Still, the hobbit had long since discovered the many pratfalls and perils of wandering into the future alone, and thus he felt it was rather time that he share his burden with someone-or-another who might consider themselves obliged to see it finished. And so – with only a modicum of apprehension, and hardly a spare helping of forethought – Bilbo told his tale to his oldest and wisest friend. 

It was a good sort of story, and as well-accounted as any of his considerable yarns ever were, but to share it here would be to double this sizable work in length, and so it must merely suffice to say that the hobbit went on for a good long time, and that the wizard was deeply fascinated by the whole of it. 

“O ho! My dear friend…” Gandalf exclaimed absently, when at last he was finished. 

O ho indeed, Bilbo thought. 

“This is rather a lot to wrap one’s head around,” Gandalf muttered, and at the very idea that it ought to be, the bowl of his pipe was re-filled and set alight once more. “Rather a lot, rather a lot…” he mumbled on. 

Bilbo, in admiration of the enormous cleverness of wizards, removed his own pipe from his right-hand pocket, and he gestured somewhat rudely toward it in Gandalf’s direction until at last the sorcerer had packed his own empty chamber with an absent wave of his hand. Indeed, his respect only deepened at the very first puff of its sweet and warming smoke, whereupon he was reminded that he was not alone in being a creature of rare and sensible taste this side of the Misty Mountains. O, to be a wizard, and to conjure up a bit of Old Toby at the mere impulse of wanting it. Why on earth they ever bothered to fuss and fiddle around in others’ affairs, when such a luxury was at their fingertips, he could not begin to imagine… 

“These are dark tidings, Bilbo,” Gandalf interrupted his reverie, with a tone now at last approaching some semblance of cognitive coherence. “Very dark indeed.” 

“You don’t say?” Bilbo grumbled (a tad bitter at the very stressors over which he had for months fretted being now so redundantly recounted to him). 

“Need I impress upon you the urgency of the matter at hand?” Gandalf demanded incredulously. “Just because our world survived such an impending storm once does not mean that we can manage it again. Worse yet, we cannot know what knowledge Sauron has of this, nor what strength he has gathered, nor most certainly can we imagine what it is he has planned. This very well may be the ruin of us all.” 

“Now this is odd indeed, Gandalf,” Bilbo remarked plainly, for he refused to be riled at so late an hour. “I never would have thought you to be one so afraid of death.” 

“Not at all, my dear friend,” Gandalf replied. “Death is a rather easy concept to consider, for it’s one of the few things we are all guaranteed in this life. No, no, it is the getting there that troubles me.” 

“Well it’s not so bad as all that, in my experience,” Bilbo reassured him – as he adamantly ignored the ridiculousness of the subject they so casually and authoritatively spoke about, and rather instead focused on the delicious and aromatic smoke that curled and danced across his tongue. “Come to think of it, you happen to be the only other person I have yet encountered who came back to this world after so definitively leaving it. Although you seemed to lose your sense of humor, then, whereas mine has only doubled.” 

“Well, it seems I must pray that you are not returned to us again,” Gandalf remarked with a put-upon passivity that was slightly ruined by his poorly-hidden smile. “For to triple it might be the death of us all.” 

Bilbo laughed heartily – even there, at the edge of a battlefield, and on the eve of the day he knew with strange certainty to be his darkest. And rather than respond, he simply waved his pipe beneath the wizard’s pointed nose once more, until it was at last refilled with only a small degree of grumbling. 

“Perhaps it is your business, then. What I was up to,” Gandalf commented at length, seeming still to consider the wisdom of sharing his information even as he did so. “The High Fells are the tombs where once the Nazgûl lay. I say once, because upon my arrival I discovered them to be empty. Broken, from the inside outward. This alone suggested Sauron’s return in terms that were quite nearly definite, but I had hoped… That is, I wished for myself a greater length of time with which to prepare, and so I did not recognize the clear signs that no reprieve would be given. It can no longer be denied, the Nine Fallen Kings ride once more.” 

“Oh dear,” muttered Bilbo, around the stem of his pipe. 

“Oh dear indeed,” replied Gandalf heavily. 

Outside, the wind began to whisper sweet secrets that caused the leaves of the forest beyond them to shiver, and to rustle out responses of their own. Somewhere further, a lone elk called out, its pitched and whistling plea for companionship echoing in ripples across the mountainside, where the first frost of the dying year coated the very sound of it with a light and shivering chill. Morning would come, but not just yet. 

“Do you think you could explain it to me, then?” Bilbo asked, after he spared himself a moment to savor the not-knowing. 

Gandalf took an enormous draw from his long-stemmed pipe, and blew forth an acrid approximation of a jackrabbit – which pranced about their tent in fume-ed form for a moment, before it seized the opportune moment provided by a gust of wind and escaped through the flap of the door as it fluttered open, before being scattered and dispersed to the breeze in almost the very first instant of its freedom. 

And then, finally, the wizard responded. 

“Do you mean to ask me if I can explain your purpose in being put upon this earth twice-over?” Gandalf inquired, to which Bilbo nodded silently. 

“Hmm…” the conjurer considered – in a way which suggested it was not for a lack of theories that he faltered in his reply, but rather that there were a good deal too many of them to choose from, and he did not quite know which speculation suited him best. 

“I believe…” he finally said, at length. “Yes, I believe, though of course I am not certain, that… Well, no. I believe I must give it some thought, and perhaps even some careful research. You might have inquired with Lord Elrond, you know. He is enormously wise, and quite well-read, and he might have been of some help to you. Perhaps I will write to him… And the Lady Galadriel, of course, for it seems she has been keeping secrets.” 

Here he smiled with absent amusement, as he chewed softly upon the stem of his pipe. And then, of a moment, he came back to himself, and finished his thought. 

“I must ask that you delay your question, my friend, and pose it to me again in the near future,” he said. “For now, we must focus on what perils lay directly ahead, and when we have seen them through the larger picture may yet become clearer to us.” 

“I suppose that is reasonable,” Bilbo grumbled unhappily, “although I’ve gone far too long without any idea of the truth of this matter, and I would much prefer to know it as soon as is possible. I find that a question of this size without a proper answer is much like a freshly-laid hen’s egg. It ought not mature, nor can it travel… Oh, how I wish for a nice, fluffy scramble. Or indeed anything that is not stew, stew, and more stew…” he muttered, now somewhat distracted. 

Gandalf chuckled at his easy diversion, and this time blew out a tauntingly-realistic chicken, which Bilbo was obliged to wave into nonexistence with an agitated hand at being so teased. 

“I have no eggs at my disposal,” the wizard replied genially, “but regarding the rest of your ruminations, it may encourage you to hear that I have often found the truth to be a thing of no great importance. It is little more than a philosophical device, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any two observers of it who might agree on just exactly what form it takes in the first place. No, Bilbo Baggins, there is no great answer to the shape and purpose of our world or your place upon it which will ever grant you divine happiness. And even were you to find one, I very much doubt you’d be able to understand it,” he mused thoughtfully. “Still, I have been told by those wiser even than me that happiness lies in the way you treat others, and in the extent of the kindness you are willing to share, especially with those who do not entirely deserve it. Perhaps the greatest and best-kept secret of this life is that it is not so very complicated at all.” 

This was all very true in itself – and Gandalf was, of course, very wise to say it. But in the end, even words so beautifully put did not entirely ease the constant ache of living. There were still taxes to be paid, after all, and neighborly disputes to be passively-aggressed, and a certain time at which tea must be had every day. It was still a very nice idea, however, and to think it made Bilbo feel a little larger, and a little less alone. 

And so he allowed himself the scarce luxury of living in the moment where he now stood without questioning its purpose. And so they remained there, they two, for quite a long while, their pipes glowing with friendly fire at their every asynchronous inhalation. Indeed, it was not until the last willowy wisp of smoke had drifted and dispersed into the beckoning night air, and in fact a time even longer than that, before their larger meeting was reconvened, and plans for the dreadful day ahead were discussed and made ready. 

So it was that with the fading refrains of distant stars to bid him farewell – as the blue light of that-time-preceding-dawn spread its silent stillness over the patient and rolling fog of morning – Bilbo walked once more toward the Lonely Mountain, its heart left far behind him, as he went to meet his fate. 

****** 

Once upon a time – a time which was very long ago, to you or I, though to an elf it may have been no more than a short holiday – Thorin Oakenshield had been a child. This fact, alone, was an odd one – for it often seemed quite nearly as impossible as it was obvious to anyone who had never witnessed the truth of it themselves. Still, it was indeed an honest statement, and furthermore will you find that it is, in fact, a statement relevant to the point at hand (though you, my dear reader, must simply trust me on this for the time being). 

Having been a child, and especially one with such unaccountable luck as to have had a mother who loved him dearly, Thorin’s earliest years had thus been filled to their very brim with folklore and fairytales. His had been the best sort, too: the kind where every evil was defined by the wonderful ways it might be defeated, and no war was ever fought that could not be won. Indeed, the dawning decades of his life were ones lived in a world where every river had an enchantress that lurked below its roiling surface – and so, similarly, did every bridge have a troll, and every troll would one day meet its match, and beneath a cloudless sky the world would be continually set right. 

More to the point, however, it should be noted that the most significant of these stories – with regards, at least, to the impression it left upon him – was one of an ancient dwarven prince, who was cursed to forget each day from the very moment it was gone from him. The specifics of this fabled damnation (and the offense that had been caused to whatever witch had set it upon the fellow) had long since been lost to the distance between Thorin and his last having heard of it, but the vague idea of its message had long lingered with him in the companionable sort of way a good tale always does. And for a great deal of time thereafter, the very inkling of such recollective impermanence had troubled him – justified though it later was with the more ripened reasonings of mature adulthood. It occupied no large part of his mind, in truth, but regarding matters immaterial – where swords and shields alone were no defense – there was little he might have once imagined to compare with the simple fear of forgetting. 

However, weary wisdom – which trails alongside the simple act of living, as if it were a strange and silent dog – would not allow him this illusion forever. For now he knew his qualms to have been foolish. Truly, there was no greater pain than to have faltered in one’s purpose, and to remember it entirely. 

“Elves! Elves!” Fili and Kili cried with alarm, as they entered raucously into their shoddy shared encampment, and roused him from the rare grasp of slumber where he had managed to find momentary escape. “Armies of elves are upon us, even beyond our counting!” 

“You say there are more than three, then?” Dwalin grumbled from his own bedding nearby, his voice thick with sleep. 

“It is no joke!” the two young dwarves insisted, deterred by nothing but their own insistence on interrupting each other. “They are at our very doorstep - were revealed at the first light of dawn - hundreds of them, if not thousands - yet they moved silently, and in splendid formation!” 

Dwalin cursed the cowardice of their fair and feeble culture, and began to wake in earnest then. And Thorin knew that he, too, should move – should take charge, even, as was his duty. For he knew well what they would see, when inevitably he peered over the splitting edge where the safety of their home was met with the untamable world beyond. He remembered it all. 

“Arm yourselves,” he commanded, after having forced himself upright. 

“Are you sure?” asked Balin warily. “We cannot know their intentions just yet, and perhaps-”

“I am,” Thorin interrupted, with no room made for question. “Arm yourselves to the teeth, and spare no effort in your mail or plates, either. We will see war, before the setting of the sun.” 

This was a grim proclamation, made all the more so but its unexpected arrival in such days that had thus far peaceably passed them by. But not a dwarf among them questioned it, and so it was that within no more than the half of an hour they faithfully flanked him at either side, as he approached the upper bastion of their barricade and peered between its arrowslits at the sinister symmetry of the elven army below. 

The orange autumn sun glinted merrily from their undented armor, as if to suggest that the threats they so to tacitly imposed were made with the very blessing of the earth itself. Perhaps they were, even. 

Though perhaps they weren’t, as for a moment – whilst they waited to be graced with the presence of their graceless commander – there was a stillness upon their legions that did not seem natural in the least. The wind howled in discomfiture with their silence, and the far distant birds sang their sweet and tuneless songs without thought toward the flighty and futile vendettas of those who trod below them. And yet not a hair upon any elven head was shifted, nor did their hearts seemed moved by the final refrains of such kind creatures, who would soon abandon their realm for the warmth of southern skies. 

Finally, though – like a shaft of unkind light through a fixed and uncanny dark – their numbers parted, and through them rode the elvenking upon his antlered elk, and the King of Dale astride a humble horse. 

Just as he remembered. 

This time it was Kili who shot a warning arrow to stay their presumptuous approach. And though he knew they would not truly fire upon his youngest nephew, Thorin’s stomach still clenched in fear as the prince’s meager threat was mimicked in full force by an army of elves at the slightest gesture of their king’s lilting hand. 

The wind howled louder, desperate to be heard over the silence of the elves. 

“We have come to tell you,” Thranduil’s sure and imperious voice fell softly over them, in such a way as ought not have been possible at so great a distance, “that a repayment of your debt has been offered, and accepted.” 

“What debt?” Thorin asked – and he reveled, for a moment, in the smallest expression of shock and annoyance that pierced through the elvenking’s unflinching brow at his having not been asked the question he so anticipated. “Are negotiations not underway?” he continued. “Or have I been gone so long from this region that I misunderstand this new form of diplomacy?” 

Bard, at least, appeared to feel somewhat guilty at such blatant accusations of betrayal, but the elvenking remained unmoved. 

“We have been given reason to doubt your earnestness in the promises that were made to us,” the Sindarin replied coolly. “Until they are fulfilled in their entirety, we prefer to ransom what reward we have been offered.” 

“And what reward is that?” Fili demanded, at Thorin’s right. “We have given you nothing, thus you have nothing!”

The elvenking smiled with what approximated smugness on such an unaffected visage as his own, and he looked then to Bard for his answer. 

“We have this,” Bard replied simply, and he pulled the Arkenstone – which seemed small and almost tawdry when held in his larger hand – from his coat pocket, holding it aloft for the dwarves to admire. 

Their anger at seeing it was unreckonable, and they shouted their curses and obscenities with great and fiery passion at the assemblage below. 

“Thieves!” they all cried, but one. “How came you by the heirloom of the house of Durin? That stone belongs to the king!” 

But Thorin said nothing, and only remembered. 

He was breathless at seeing it, even as he had been when once he stood upon this very spot so very long ago. And it called to him still, no matter the contempt he held for it… It whispered with vile warmth, its artificial affections beckoning that he hold it – that he know the unalterable constancy of its companionship. He could not have the very heart for which he was designed, but surely the heart of the mountain might be just as sweet? Was it truly so wrong to settle? 

He remembered each and every word of these putrid promises, felt the same rancid appeal he once had, and the very recognition sickened him. 

“The king may have it, with our goodwill” Bard called with measured affect up to them – and he seemed to make no effort to taunt or rile as did his companion, instead merely intending to bargain. “But first,” he added, “we must ask that he honor his word.” 

This simple request sparked a second wave of indignancy and outrage from the dwarrow – for they saw no reason that their honor should be questioned so, and especially the honor of the king who had deigned to meet with such wretched betrayers in the first place. 

“It is a trick!” the shouted. “Surely it must be! A ruse, of some sort! Some filthy elvish lie! The Arkenstone is in this mountain, for who among us would have removed it!” 

They continued on in this manner for more than a moment – their audience of turncoats appearing to have no intention to disrupt them, and perhaps even enjoying their dismay. And indeed, they may have continued in such a way for a good while longer (for dwarves possess no shortage of curses and insults, especially where elves are concerned), were it not for the small and tired voice that interrupted oh-so meekly and ever-so near to them. 

“It is no trick,” it said. “The stone is real.” 

Thorin remembered this too. 

“I gave it to them,” Bilbo continued on, as he stepped from the shadows where he had walked unseen, and stood only feet from them now. 

“You…” Thorin began. But he could not even finish his words before he was choked by them. 

“I took it as my fourteenth share,” the hobbit continued on boldly, even as he could not look in the mere direction of the one with whom he meant to argue. 

Thorin took a step toward him. Tentatively, carefully, with such obvious motion that even out of the corner of his eye Bilbo would know to expect his approach. 

“You…” Thorin tried once more, but he could not possibly continue as he saw Bilbo cringe, quite obviously, at this singular response. The fear he seemed to feel – he, the bravest of them all – at the threat of Thorin’s anger became a tight and burning knot of dismay in the king’s stomach. 

“I did not steal it,” Bilbo said – now softly, though still with admirable conviction. “I may be a burglar, but I’d like to think I’m an honest one. I’m willing to let it stand against my claim…” 

Here he trailed off, and the silence persisted. 

“If I have a claim, still,” he continued on nervously, when it seemed he could bear the quietus no longer. “I rather think I have earned it. I… that is…” 

“You…”

“I…” 

“You came back.” 

Thorin had not meant to interrupt him – had not meant to say anything, when the very sound of his voice was regarded with such fear. But his surprise would be contained no longer, it seemed, and it was with enormous relief that he noted no increase in the lines of uneasiness upon the hobbit’s brow, when his words were spoken and settled in the space between them.

Indeed, it – if anything – was instead rather quickly creased with thorough confusion. 

“I came back?” Bilbo asked, blinking with clear and nervous puzzlement. “Well of course I did-”

Thorin stepped closer, and was emboldened to discover that his further proximity seemed to cause no more distress. 

“- I would never abandon you lot, especially not for the wood-elves, of all people. I just -”

Another step. 

“- well, I worried. I worried a great deal, and it may be that I was wrong -” 

Another step, ever closer. 

“- in my suspicions, but you cannot fault me for having done so. I -”

Another step, until they were standing before each other. Close, and yet still distant. 

“- I… I… I only meant to -”

And there, Thorin kissed him. 

It was their first kiss, of course, but it was also much more than that. It was every kiss they ought to have had before, had Thorin found the courage. It was the kiss they should have shared on the carrock a lifetime ago, when Thorin had found he lacked the strength to deny to himself any longer the powerful truth that he had found his One. It was the kiss they should have had twice when the burglar had so cleverly rescued him from the Elvenking’s clutches, and it was the very same kiss he wished he could have given him the moment his friend had opened up his little green door that second first time, and Thorin felt his heart open right along with it. 

He slid an uncertain hand upward to cup Bilbo’s soft jaw as gently as he could, and with the tenderest of touches he tried to convey everything his trembling heart had kept him from uttering aloud. He felt somehow as if – after all this time, wherein he had suffered alone – he was to be offered this single and solitary chance to share the burden of his longing with someone who might understand, in some small part, how to shoulder the load. Like he had kept every promise of devotion on the tip of his tongue for so long that he no longer knew how to spit them out. And so he simply kissed Bilbo with every minute he had spent looking at him from afar and had yearned to touch, and with every hour he had spent sleeping cold and alone and wishing he were not so. He raised another slightly shaking hand, to rest it over his hobbit’s heart, and he did so with the burning knowledge of the months he had spent thinking of no one else, and the life he had spent waiting to think of him at all. 

It is a point well-established, by now, that the many races of Middle Earth never could agree on anything. And though we will not linger upon its relevance to any other cultures, it should here be remarked that to the dwarves, a first kiss was often rather like declaring war. There were few things which they imagined could possibly feel better than the singular short-lived moment in which you did it, but immediately after followed the stomach-clenching realization that the next few minutes – or hours, or perhaps even years – would be spent dealing with the repercussions of a single triumphant second or two. 

It was also like a declaration of war, in that to them it almost always felt worth it. 

And it was, Thorin thought, as he pulled away and noted the look of utter shock upon Bilbo’s face. It was worth it.


	18. Chapter 18

In the quiet days, when our minds are allowed such a great expanse of silence that they might be given to roaming about it freely, we may occasionally imagine just what it is like to look down upon the world in much the same way the Valar do. And overwhelming though it may be to consider unfurling the whole of Middle Earth like a great glittering tapestry (for we are only human, after all), it will perhaps comfort you to know that between the grand and grasping fingers of ancient mountains, and speckled along the shorelines of every raging river, there are little towns. And though on the surface these towns might appear so wholly different from each other as to only confuse and overwhelm the viewer further, when their unknown streets are navigated correctly, and their varying cultures are learned and understood little by little, there is – somewhere, and often at the center of them – always to be found a small pub. And within every pub, no matter how far from home the visiting traveler might have trudged, there will only ever be one language which is spoken, familiar and friendly as the greyest blanket in the furthest corner of your childhood’s linen closet. And that language is Nonsense. 

Pubs, you see, are nothing more than the microcosmic remains of the ancient symposiums, where once great philosophers and mathematicians and poets would gather together to discover the many multitudinous ways in which they could possibly disagree with one another. Just so, within these crude contemporary remnants there is always to be found a congregation of modern intellectuals, graduated as they are from such prestigious schools of thought as My Brother What Works There Told Me, and If You Ask Me The World Is Like An Onion. Indeed, no matter the race or native language or regional accent or general-capacity-for-coherence of any given patron, they can always rest easy in the knowledge that they will be understood quite well in a pub, where everyone shares a collective fluency in the language of Nonsense. 

Bilbo, as it happens, was a great lover of a good trip down to the taproom for this very reason – though this certainly hadn’t been the case before his first fateful journey with the dwarves, oh no indeed. Once, a very long time ago, he had been considered the perfectly respectable sort (even just a touch to the right side of on boring), and was far more likely to be found sipping wine in the company of the lilies of his garden than drinking ales of unknown origin and unencouraging distilment by the half-pint, whilst surrounded by the sorts of people who always found very crude ways of saying everything but exactly what they mean. This is not to say, of course, that his fellow hobbits found offense with the idea of ale itself (for if they did they would discover themselves to be nearly twice as constantly outraged as they already were, and with themselves most of all). No, it was not the liquor of choice that bothered them so, but rather it was the unpardonable Nonsense which always permeated such places. And while there was no accounting for the behaviors of any Bree-folk, it was for this very reason that down at Tolman Cotton’s inn there was a strict requirement for conversation of a purely practical nature, and song and dance only where drink might appropriately dictate. 

The hobbits, you see, did not understand that such behavior was merely Nonsense of their own sort, but because Bilbo knew this and kept it politely to himself for many a year – even until his dying day – we shall not spoil their fun by telling them.

Regardless, the point of the matter is thus: Bilbo had – especially in those unanticipatable days, when he was as likely to miss his friends with dreadful urgency as the sky was to fill with storm clouds – often had occasion to walk until his feet were sore, at which point he would enter into the nearest pub to be found, and engage in a conversation concerning whatever Nonsense seemed most wonderful to him with whatever fellow traveler was most capable of delivering it. So it was that in those days he had learned a great many things about the world which were as utterly fascinating as they were entirely useless to him, and were further almost certain to slip so cleanly out of his unstable ears on his tottering journey home that he wouldn’t recall a mite of them by the time he arrived upon his doorstep. 

There had been one time, however, when the wonderful Nonsense had not been so wonderful, and every descriptive word of it had stuck to his mind like a scone to an unbuttered pan.

The conversation had begun engagingly enough – aided as it was by the great quantity of drink Bilbo’s jingling pockets were always able to inspire. The man he met that day had been a fisherman, come down from the roiling northern seas just above Hobbiton in search of employment on the fairer tides of Lake Evindim. His tales had been as tall as they were long, and were twice as entertaining as you might imagine from one for whom mortal peril seemed to nothing more than a daily activity allotted its time between breakfast and supper. And Bilbo had thoroughly enjoyed knowing him, for that brief afternoon where their paths had crossed. 

But then the man had mentioned the many sunken ships he had once sailed upon, and Bilbo had made the dreadful mistake of inquiring just what it felt like to come so close to drowning. He had remembered it ever since – though even with his twice-daring escapes from the dungeons of the elvenking, he had always suspected he never truly understood it. Not, at least, until today. 

Today, the wind coursed through the trees with pitched refrain, and paired with the shuddering rhythm of leaves and branches it became the whispers of a timbered choir. The structure of its tune is not one to be understood in this lifetime, but perhaps it was a requiem. Or perhaps, still, it was only an Evensong.

Regardless, its chorale fell upon deaf ears, for throughout the great unhearing congregations of men and elves not a word was spoken. Even amongst the dwarves, nothing was said that wasn’t muttered, and that is quite the same thing with their lot. 

And Bilbo Baggins was, of course, drowning. 

Not physically, mind you (though I’m sure that you, my reader, are quite clever enough to have ascertained as much). Even so, as Thorin finally released him – and the musky scent of oiled leather and terrible pipeweed that always clung to the king’s beard was batted away on the breeze, no longer sheltered by their closeness – he was quite certain he finally understood the sensation. For he felt rather as if he had become suddenly and drastically submerged in the murky depths of some unknown sea, which pommeled him mercilessly this way and that, until he was hopelessly entangled in their uncharted chill. And he was left with little to do but hope that the direction in which he desperately swam was the right one, which would lead him to break the surface of this muddy haze and allow him the burning relief of a single clear thought. 

Thorin looked at him, and for a moment this slightly-stonier and more reserved iteration of the dwarf – to which Bilbo had become accustomed in this revisited world, though he could not account for his slightly changed nature – seemed nearly to melt away, so that he could have sworn that the king that stood before him was quite identical to the one he had once met a century ago, on a warm summer’s night in the middle of an abandoned supper. 

This, aggravatingly enough, did little to reinforce the small hope of clarity to which he so desperately clung, and instead only caused him to stutter “I… Tha-…. Well, I never…..” 

Thorin heaved a great sigh – though it was done slowly and carefully, as if he meant not to frighten him. And it was only then that Bilbo noticed that he had himself stepped back, so that the singular connection that remained between them was just the light touch of Thorin’s strong and steady hand over his heart. 

It occurred to him all over again, at that moment, that there was certainly something he was expected to say just then, only for the life of him he still couldn’t imagine what it ought to be. 

Luckily, it is the great apology of our cold and mathematical universe that in spite of the many enormous and ineffable circumstances it insists on throwing our way, we are given the wonderful allowance of friends – who will always stand by our sides long after we can no longer stand at all, and will invariably dare to suggest that the circumstances be effed anyway. 

In this instance, it was Bifur who cast the lifeline (though, true to form, it was done with a great deal of bluntness and sarcasm). 

“I…” Bilbo carried on, and it was scarcely more than an exhalation. 

“Atatha 'udran!” the dwarf said loudly behind him. 

It’s about time!

This, it seemed, was all the permission the dwarves needed, and almost immediately thereafter they began to carry on in a very dwarven fashion, with tremendous whoops and hollers, and the occasional whistle, and the even scarcer sniffle. And Bilbo was very relieved to discover that their ridiculousness was almost like a guiding light leading him toward cognizance, until with a rushing sound in his ears and a tingling sort of feeling on his cheeks he suddenly discovered himself to be very painfully aware of just exactly what had happened, and just precisely who had seen it. 

To this point: as might be imagined, their dwarven ruckus annoyed the elves below quite enormously, and Bilbo noted the acrimonious scowl that spoilt King Thranduil’s fair and even face with a particular sense of dread. King Bard, for his part, instead seemed rather embarrassed at having been made an unwilling witness to matters he likely considered his concern and his business in equally marginal measure, and had rather turned his gaze to observe the great clouds of smoke which were enthusiastically exhaled from Gandalf’s smugly smirking mouth. 

Gandalf… when had the wizard arrived, anyway? Bilbo did not recall having noticed his entrance into their uncomfortable congregation, but then he had been rather distracted when Thorin had… 

Had Thorin? Had he actually? 

I regret to tell you, reader, that the next few moments cannot possibly be accounted for – for Bilbo was not so clearheaded and cognizant as he imagined himself to be, even by half, and they therefore passed him by in a dizzying blur of a sort that does not merit description. He was made vaguely aware that some manner of ceasefire was reached, and that the matter of the stolen Arkenstone was brushed aside in an impassionate fashion which seemed to aggravate the elvenking rather immensely. The whole of this hardly mattered to the hobbit, however, for even then he was quite flustered enough that he could not possibly recall the importance of that ridiculous rock, nor why it was he felt he should be so committed to its fate. 

Before he knew it, he was being escorted swiftly away from the windswept ramparts at the outskirts of Erebor, and was instead guided by Balin’s steadying hand on his elbow as they ventured down and deeper into the heart of the mountain. 

Deeper, he then realized. Not away from. Oughtn’t he be leaving it? Wasn’t there some reason he shouldn’t be permitted to stay? He could swear that there might be, and at discovering himself to be so frighteningly overwhelmed by the jostling joyity of the dwarves surrounding him, Bilbo put a hand over his right vest-pocket, which calmed him as he felt the reassuring weight of his Ring within it. 

Before he could even consider running, however, he had been escorted into some sort of grand receiving room, where the faded remnants of crumbling frescos appeared to once have depicted Thorin’s ancestors in wonderfully-painted portrayals of triumph and revelry. Now, however, they hid their faces behind the same layers of dust which coated every surface in the equalizing nature of atrophy, and it was rather easy to imagine that any reason for their gaiety had only ever been destined to become similarly obscured. 

Bilbo noticed the silence long before he noticed that he was alone. But he hardly had the time to gather up his scattered thoughts and realize that he ought to arrange them in some way, before his solitude was broken by the sound of quiet and strangely-halting footsteps as Thorin joined him, a bundle of something wrapped in faded cloth gripped tightly in his hands. 

The great wooden door through which the king had entered hammered to a heavy close behind him, its every decorative rivet and keenly-crafted flush-bolt groaning and clattering with the weight of the many years it had gone unopened. And for a moment the stillness between them was full of nothing but the echoing memory of this singular sound which had dared to venture into their voiceless exchange. 

Thorin then approached him hastily, for a few strides, before seeming to recover himself in some unknown way. And at doing so he stopped abruptly, still at a considerable distance from the hobbit, where he fiddling nervously with the package in his hands. 

“Bilbo, my friend,” he began all at once, his demeanor betraying a carefully reserved sort of urgency that – in truth – somehow still betrayed nothing at all. 

“I must apologize – I did not – that is, without regret, I must admit that I was hasty in my response to your unexpected-”

“Theft?” Bilbo interrupted to ask, as he felt suddenly quite desperate to get to the point of the matter he had so long dreaded to revisit (just as he was, oddly enough, quite equally desperate to be returned to the hollow comfort that accompanied knowing more than one naturally ought to about the direction of one’s own day). 

“No, no. Your return,” Thorin corrected him intently. “I had not expected you to return to us, and I must admit I was overcome by my-”

“You expected me to abandon you all?” Bilbo demanded, a small and angry sense of hurt burning low in his heart – or perhaps even lower, in his stomach even, and slightly to the right. 

“No!” Thorin insisted with evident frustration, and he stepped forward in his urgency so that the space between them was eliminated little by little. “Well, no, I did not mean to say – I merely felt that you would not be entirely at fault were you to be so inclined...” 

He stopped then, and seemed almost lost – as if there were something he meant to say, and he were somehow ill-equipped to say it. 

“Allow me to begin anew,” the king continued. “I wish to thank you. I fear I have perhaps made myself appear ungrateful, when-”

“You have nothing to be grateful for, if that is your purpose,” Bilbo interrupted, meeting his eyes with persistent resolve. “I have acted as any friend would, for I am your friend, though you may wish not to hear it.” 

“My friend…” Thorin echoed quietly. “You are that, though in truth I do not appreciate so pointed a reminder at present.” 

“Then I will remind you again, for as many times as must be done until my meaning is understood,” Bilbo insisted (for he now recognized that somehow, in some unknown way, he had managed to be allotted this small moment – here, on the cusp of an impending battle – with which he might privately convince Thorin to see reason, and seek sanity). 

“Then please, my friend,” Thorin entreated, stepping closer still, until they were within arm’s reach of one other (where Bilbo was suddenly made aware of the odd and almost angry hurt in the dwarf’s eyes). “After such prolonged silence you must allow me the relief of expressing how I feel. I beg of you, you must permit me to say it once.”

Oddly enough, it only then occurred to Bilbo that he had been so intent on making his own point that he had not yet listened to a word of Thorin’s, and he realized of a moment that he had not the faintest idea what the king was talking about, nor why it was that he had… Why exactly, that is, he had felt the unaccountable urge to… 

“You kissed me,” Bilbo said abruptly, his shock at suddenly realizing the extent of their situation seeping into his voice in a way which was almost accusatory. 

Thorin’s broad shoulders slumped, for a moment – and he appeared quite nearly pained, his fingers tightening their grip upon the cloth-covered bundle in his hands. 

“I did, indeed,” he replied, though he offered no apology nor explanation. 

“Why did you do that?” Bilbo asked, and he meant it even. For though he could hardly claim to be even the slightest bit opposed to the idea of it, he could not fathom of why such a wish – kept so distant and so inconceivably silent in the farthest reaches of his heart – could possibly have been granted. 

The king seemed to consider his question in great depth – as if, as Bilbo suspected, even he did not know the answer. Finally, however, his jaw clenched with a resolve that was by this point thoroughly familiar to the hobbit, and he appeared almost to brace himself as he prepared to speak. 

“I did it because…” Thorin began, just as a shaft of light broke through some heretofore unobserved skylighting located just above them – where somewhere, miles away, the drifting clouds must have parted, and in so doing they allowed a burst of sweet serenity to escape onto the world below. The small beam of golden-gilt brilliance danced and entangled itself with the drifting dust that surrounded them for a moment, before it landed upon the faded portraits at their sides, illuminating colors and hues that had been hidden only moments before. 

“I did it because I could bear it no longer,” Thorin began again, undeterred. His brows knit together in a stern and unapologetic expression as he spoke, and he observed some far distant point just beyond Bilbo with great interest. 

“Could bear wh-” Bilbo started to ask, before…

“I love you,” Thorin said plainly, his statement as rushed as it was simple. 

“You…” Bilbo began to wonder, before trailing off (for he did not want to believe it, as in truth he did not dare). 

“I have no motives, surely you must understand this,” Thorin insisted emphatically, his hands fiddling with the frayed edges of the cloth he clung to as he took another halting step forward. “You are not noble by birth, nor do you have any such vast wealth as might tempt me. I love you simply because I must. My heart beats only for the enduring sense that it was you who put it there. And I would offer you my hand in marriage, if you would take it.”

He stopped himself, then, and his gaze returned to meet Bilbo’s own as he reacted in some utterly unparsable way to what he saw there. 

“You…” Bilbo attempted again, his tone still thoroughly disbelieving. 

“Please,” Thorin interrupted, though his voice was quiet, and his demeanor almost hurt. “Do not look at me like that… As if to receive my love has tainted you. I know that you must think me the vilest of creatures, but surely the most pure and delicate of my feelings are not so abhorrent to you that you would despise me for them.”

And there he sighed, for a moment, before continuing on. 

“I must admit, though you will no doubt think worse of me for it, that could I cleanse you of my devotion I would not. There is much this world has required of me, and much I must yet do, but for that I do not have the strength.”

“I do not… I cannot claim to understand,” Bilbo replied stutteringly – though he meant this as much in regards to his own tumultuous feelings as to the words he was so shocked at having heard. 

It ought to have been an easy thing to consider, in fact it ought to have been the easiest. But after two lifetimes spent with the fervent refusal to imagine a single could-have-been – much less a mite of might-have-done – it does not come quite naturally to believe that any feelings one had never dared to hope might have been felt by another were, in fact, even possible. And to merely be told otherwise by the very one who claimed to feel so seemed, rather oddly, not to be nearly enough.

Even worse, there was some strange voice in the back of Bilbo’s mind – the sort that whispered things he already knew, and yet dreaded to realize – which reminded insistently him that after nothing in his renewed life had come so easily, why should this? 

Thorin had pointed out the obvious fact that he was not noble by birth, after all. And he had mentioned the temptation of vast wealth, had he not? 

“He oughtn’t be trusted… Oughtn’t be trusted…”

The internal counsel that advised him so seemed to run circles around itself – its tone carefree and singsong, as if the matter at hand really were so obvious. Perhaps it was, even...

“Oughtn’t be trusted… what does he really want? What really tempts him? Certainly not a little hobbit, possessor of no skills that might be considered of any importance to a dwarf…”

This certainly seemed true. Didn’t it? 

“And such skills are of twice as scant value to a king, you must remember that Bilbo… A king who has already found and lost his life’s only true love… What does he really want? What value do we really have to him? 

“What value do you have? 

“What do you value?”

The Ring. Oh, in the end, it truly was obvious. Of course it was. And Bilbo might have laughed at himself, had the realization not savored so terribly of bitterness. 

He looked around himself for a moment, lost as he was in his downwardly drifting thoughts, and he discovered that although the light had not yet left them the colors he had appreciated only a moment ago were much duller than he had perceived them to be. Equally, it became rather suddenly apparent to him that no amount of excellent dwarven craftsmanship – which had before seemed so impressive, present as it was in the arches and mouldings and the very foundation of this place – could ever outlive the simple rotting doggedness of time, which wore every vaulting smooth, and shattered every clerestory window. Indeed, it somehow became a sudden certainty to Bilbo that there was never anything made which would not one day be broken. And for a second or two it even seemed utterly ridiculous to him, in a way which he realized with mild interest was perhaps uncharacteristic, that anything was ever bothered to be made at all. 

He truly had thought he alone might have tempted Thorin. How utterly ridiculous. How could he have forgotten that he carried the only item over which age itself had no hold? The single glittering temptation which was known to capture the noblest of kings, and which possessed a radiant and illimitable presence that entrapped the interest of anyone within its mere proximity. He knew that Thorin was rather susceptible to these things. How had he not seen it before?

He really oughtn’t be trusted. 

“Am I to take your silence as rejection?” Thorin asked, his expression now diplomatically subdued. 

It was an odd sort of thing, but even then – knowing what he did – Bilbo wanted desperately to accept. Thorin did not truly love him, of course, but perhaps this shadowed counterfeit would be more mimicry than mockery. He did not seem to understand the dark source of his desire, after all, and there was certainly no benefit to be found in telling him… Perhaps, the hobbit considered, it might feel the slightest bit better to be held for the wrong reasons than it would to live at a distance for the right ones. 

But of course it wasn’t, he remembered – and in doing so he felt more like himself than he had in a good long time. He would not allow himself to take advantage of his friend’s greatest weakness, just because he was foolish enough to have spent a lifetime wishing they were slightly more than friends in the first place. How frightfully immoral it had been of him to even consider it. 

“Yes, I-” Bilbo began, before stopping himself to ensure that he was truly about to say what it was he meant to. “It would be better for the both of us if you did, I fear.” 

Thorin nodded, his expression now firm and resolute, and entirely dispassionate. 

“And may I inquire why?” he asked – slowly, almost as if he were not entirely sure he wanted to. “I know that we have not always – that I have not, perhaps, been entirely kind to you on our journey, I mean to say… But I cannot imagine why you seem so stricken by my offer, if we are, as you claim, friends.” 

“We are!” Bilbo insisted quickly. “Of course we are, Thorin. And I am flattered that you imagine my humble hobbit-ly ways to be your match in any measure. It is just… Well, I fear it would not be wise.” 

“You do not love me?” Thorin asked as much as said. 

“I…” Bilbo began. “I do not love you in the way I suspect you love me.” 

And it was the truth, he felt, though it was said with trickery. 

“Is it him, then?” Thorin continued to pry (though Bilbo could not imagine what motivated him, as uninteresting as he now seemed to find his every question). 

“Who?” the hobbit responded. 

“The one you cared for, so long ago,” Thorin clarified coldly. “Hobbits do not have Ones, I know. Yet you truly do not think you could give your heart to another?” 

“Oh, of course,” Bilbo remembered – and he was enormously relieved to have been provided such a reasonable and truthful out, as ridiculous as it might have been to tell Thorin that he could not marry the dwarf because he was too in love with him to consider it. “You are right, I do not think I ever could. You must know that I do love you, Thorin. I love you very, very much. But I cannot marry you.” 

Thorin nodded again – seeming this time steadier and more resolved, though it pained Bilbo to notice a small ember of hurt in his eyes, which was clear for the briefest of moments even with the now-obvious extent to which he had tried to hide it. Wordlessly, the dwarf then handed over the cloth-wrapped package (which Bilbo had quite forgotten to wonder about, amidst all the fuss). 

“This is for you,” Thorin said. “It is a gift, not given with any expectation, nor bound to any promise. And if I am your friend, still, then I would ask that you wear it.” 

Bilbo unfolded its soft and clumsy wrappings, and discovered the familiar weight of his mithril shirt as it was returned to his hands. It glimmered as if in greeting where it caught the fading light, and its delicate mail folded and crimped like the softest of silk, just exactly as he recalled from a time that was surely not so long ago. 

“It is silver-steel,” Thorin explained softly (though of course Bilbo already knew). “Mithril, crafted by my forebearers. No blade can pierce it... It will protect you, in the battle to come.” 

“Thank you, Thorin,” Bilbo began, “I-”

But Thorin cut him off, and for the first time since their fateful kiss on the ramparts, he touched Bilbo. Lightly, on his arm, and it was the urgency of the action as much as it was its careful intimacy which caused whatever words Bilbo had intended to say to falter on his tongue. 

“There is much that lies in store for you, Master Hobbit,” Thorin cautioned, with a bewildering yet commanding insistence. And as frazzled and frayed as Bilbo felt, in that moment, he noticed vaguely that the musky scent of leather and pipeweed had filled his lungs once more. 

“I will do my part in protecting you from it,” the king continued, “and this armor will surely help. But you must promise me that you will do your utmost to keep yourself safe. I will speak of this matter no more, if you do not wish to hear it, but I will tell you one final time before we part that I could not bear your loss.” 

So honest and pure was his pronouncement – stripped bare, as it was, of any flowery words or thoughts of tender return – that for a moment Bilbo quite foolishly believed him. 

“Nor I yours, Thorin,” he responded, and he was hardly able to muster much embarrassment with the way his voice cracked as he said so. 

“Perhaps you will permit me…” Thorin started, as he gathered himself to his full height and returned to regal posture. 

“Yes?” Bilbo asked, quite ready to permit him anything. 

“Dawn has come, and war looms on our horizon. There is no amount of foreknowledge which will allow me… I may never see you again,” Thorin concluded a tad clumsily. 

And there, where words abandoned him, he reached for Bilbo’s small and slightly-dirty hand, and clasped it in both of his own. He did not ask permission, then, though he was granted it just the same. 

Instead, he carefully relished in the soft warmth of the palm that rested lightly in his fingers, before he raised it to his lips, and he pressed them briefly against the hobbit’s unscarred knuckles. 

It was a moment which ought to have lasted forever, if only the world were a fractionally kinder place. Instead, however, it was brief, and soon Thorin guided the hand in his own downward to where he had first gathered it up, before he gently released it for what he suspected may well be the very last time. His own hands, he put in his pockets – for they had suddenly grown cold – and therein they were offered no comfort save the smooth brushing contact he made with the little acorn he kept in one of them. 

And miles above they two, entirely unconcerned with the ways of the world below, the clouds gathered back together to mingle and become one, and light was once more banished from the earth. 

***** 

Dáin II Ironfoot, Lord of the Iron Hills of Rhovanion, was a dwarf fond of many things. His battle boars were certainly first and foremost, and then perhaps his family, and then – of course – his people, and after that was any given opportunity for a good toast made with an excellent ale (though it should be noted that the extent of rousing speech, in his mind, was little more than to shout “to the hunt!” before sloshing half the tankard into his mouth and a quarter of it down his bright red beard). 

Still, it should by no means be said that Dain was a dwarf fond of everything, for in particular he had never been much fond of exaggeration. In fact, to phrase things so in front of him was quite easily twice as dangerous as tempting a pack of starving wargs with only….. that is, it was thoroughly unwise, at any rate.

So it is that I must tell you that he arrived upon the foot of the mountain at a time shortly after lunch, when the sun hung as heavily in the sky as a burning ball of fire equating to roughly 2x10^30 kg of mass is wont to do. The wind speed was 8.3 mph, the day slightly overcast without threatening rain, his army amounting to roughly 500 dwarrow marching in tight formation, and the overall mood – if I am permitted to speak to such lacking specifics – was definitively dour. 

Poor Bilbo was a decided victim of this dominant disposition (as much as he was, in truth, the source of it) and so he sat at a careful distance from where the others made their plans and compared their reconnaissance for the anticipated battle that had yet to befall them. And he might have stayed there for a good while longer, were it not for…

“Bilbo Baggins, why on earth do you look so dreary?” there came a voice. “I seem to recall having been made an unwitting witness to a display only this morning which I had thought would surely have cheered you.” 

Bilbo startled and looked up – and then looked up a bit more, for it was Gandalf who had interrupted his reverie 

“Oh bother it all,” the hobbit grumbled, although he patted the ground beside him just the same, and tried not to laugh at Gandalf’s clumsy approach to sitting upon it. “I suppose you’ve come here to express your disbelief at my decision, just like all the rest.” 

“Your decision?” Gandalf asked, seeming thoroughly confused (for apparently there was less time for gossip amongst their camps than Bilbo had anticipated, when war was only hours off). “You don’t mean to tell me you refused him?” 

“Of course I did!” Bilbo cried, by this point utterly exhausted with explaining himself – though he was to some extent relieved that with Gandalf, at least, he could explain himself at all. “He – well I suppose you wouldn’t recall this, of course, but Thorin was rather susceptible to the call of the Arkenstone when I was here last. Surely I mentioned it?” 

This apparently illuminated very little to the old wizard, for all that he delighted in reminding them that his wisdom was the source of legends. 

“He is susceptible to… to shiny bits of treasure,” Bilbo carried on, becoming flustered by his own annoyance. “And cursed ones twice over. And I carry with me the most cursed and most treasured item ever to have befallen this dratted world.” 

This, still, did apparent little to clear up Gandalf’s view of things – though Bilbo thought with some irritation that it might have done had the old sod not hastened as invariably as always to produce a prolific cloud of pipe smoke, which veiled the world around them in a hazy and blue-tinged mist. Still, the little hobbit did accept the pipe when it was offered, so perhaps he was not so entirely annoyed after all. 

“He doesn’t love me, Gandalf,” Bilbo said with dreadful finality, after he had taken a puff or two and returned the pipe to its owner. 

“He does,” Gandalf replied calmly, as if it were a statement of such obviousness he could hardly be bothered to question it. 

“He doesn’t!” Bilbo cried. “He loves the Ring, and he loves me only for carrying it!” 

“Has he said as much to you?” Gandalf asked, now seeming at least somewhat curious, as any good friend ought to have been long before that point. 

“Well, no, not in so many words.” 

“But he is aware of it? He has expressed interest?” 

“No, no,” Bilbo said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I would never have told him, don’t be ridiculous.” 

“Then why-” Gandalf began. 

“He just… He oughtn’t be trusted,” Bilbo responded (and truth be told, he cringed at his words as he said them – for they were quite mean-spirited, and when spoken aloud they felt somehow false). 

Gandalf seemed to notice his reaction, though he kindly did little more to point it out than to frown from around the stem of his pipe as he continued to produce great clouds of smoke which drifted lazily on the breeze – wafting slowly toward the tents at a short distance from them, and eventually causing the elves who convened at their entrance to wrinkle their fair and unfreckled noses in disgust. This, at least, gave the both of them cause to smile for a moment, and Bilbo was struck by the faint and gratifying reminder that even in the darkest and most closed-off of times, laughter always did manage to find its way in. 

“I think I am quite as convinced of that as you are, my dear fellow,” Gandalf responded after that moment’s pause. “In fact, I must admit to being surprised at your willful blindness. I rather expected you might have learnt better by now.”

And of all the many flaws of wizards, this was perhaps the grandest. For much as they seemed to be constantly delighted with themselves at being the world’s leading experts on everything that led the world, they were yet entirely incapable of elaborating upon the details of any of it to anyone who might stupidly bother to ask. It was rather as if the universe itself was an equation (likely the unbearably long sort, with squiggles and symbols and decimals that were bound to end up in the wrong places), and wizards themselves were given the quantity of X. Certainly they must be important, for no one who wasn’t would dare to wear such a ridiculous hat. But apparently the job of being important was all they were good for, and it was instead up to you to determine the how and the why of it all. 

“Oh, what use are wizards, if you can’t just tell me what it is you think I ought to know?” demanded Bilbo (who, in truth, had indeed woken up that morning feeling rather stupid). “It seems as if the world has been trying to teach me something from the very moment I was born, and yet for the life of me - both of them, even - I can’t manage to make out her meaning! But surely you must understand her by now?”

“The world has a number of things to say Bilbo Baggins,” Gandalf elaborated unhelpfully. “But have you never considered that she might wish to say something different to each of us? You must pardon my unpardonable rudeness, Master Hobbit, but I further wish to remark that I rather suspect that you are searching for an answer you already have.” 

“Why on earth would I do that?” Bilbo asked incredulously.

“Because when you have the answer to something you are thereafter obliged to say it aloud,” the wizard elaborated with a dramatic and wholly unnecessary flourish of his pipe. “And it seems to me that you are afraid to do so.”

“And why would that be?” Bilbo grumbled, already certain he wouldn’t understand the answer. 

“I imagine it is because you are afraid it will go unheard.” 

Bilbo huffed with annoyance, which caused the lazy veil of smoke in which they were so comfortably enshrouded to part for a moment, and the world beyond it to become ever-so-slightly more clear. 

“What drattable wizardly nonsense that is,” he grumbled, as he ran his hands through the grass below them and resisted the urge to tear it up as once he would have in his youth. “Whyever would I refuse to say something, if the idea of its never being spoken is so terrifying to me?”

“Why indeed…” Gandalf replied, and his tone was smug, as if he were rather under the impression he’d just won their little argument. Perhaps he had, in his own mind, for if vertical thinking is common and lateral thinking is intelligent, wizards are instead prone to design their pondering in a sort of Möbius loop – wherein inside was out, and dimensions were a matter of choice, and there was only one side to everything, and that side was theirs.

Bilbo had rightfully begun to become rather sick of this confusticatable conversation, and in fact he might have said as much, were it not for the distant echoing call of a deep and richly-toned dwarven warhorn, the staccato triplets of which warned them that battle was expected to arrive upon them soon, and they were advised to make themselves ready. 

“The thing you seem to forget, my dear boy, is that no story is ever clear to the ones who are living it,” Gandalf told him finally, as they stood and prepared themselves to part. “To us it certainly may have seemed, in your lifetime previous, that the great point of it all was for your young nephew to bear a terrible burden and thereby free Middle Earth from the vile legions of Sauron. But you must also consider that it’s entirely possible that, to the Valar, this was nothing but an odd and unnecessary subplot. It may very well be that the only reason for any of this – even now – is the love between a ridiculously blind hobbit and a stubborn dwarven king.”

“Oh dear… That’s a terrible amount of responsibility to consider,” Bilbo muttered worriedly, and he was quite shocked enough at the seriousness of such an implication that he entirely forgot to be offended at the adjectives he had been accorded. 

“Perhaps,” Gandalf replied with an eternally odd degree of cheer, as he scattered the smoke in a great gust of wind summoned only by the absentminded wave of his hand. “But you must remember that it’s equally likely that this whole universe revolves around a fish at the bottom of a lake somewhere. It’s best not to get too hung up on these things.” 

And with no more offers of reassurance, nor the scarcest hint of advice, the wizard then walked away to engage in a conversation with a far-distant Thranduil (which Bilbo thought, rather irritatedly, was likely to be twice as ridiculous as the one they’d just concluded, and would yet manage to accomplish half as much). 

Wizards… Confound them all. 

******* 

There has long been a great deal of fuss made about dictionaries and their varying degrees of usefulness. Lexicographers, of course, would have you believe that they are the fount of all knowledge (and that the font of all knowledge was likely Cambria, 10 point, single-spaced). Poets, on the other hand, tend to largely prefer thinking about language as an elastic medium, wherein any word can mean anything to anyone – or, barring that, may at least mean anything to anyone’s Literature professor. Librarians, meanwhile, enjoy having dictionaries because they tend to be rather enormous and impressive, and when set upon a similarly impressive stand of some sort they tie a room together quite nicely (even if they are invariably left open by any previous reader to a certain page beginning with “foundation” and ending with “funk”). Finally – and perhaps most unimportantly of all – there are those people who have decided to entrench themselves in an ill-advised argument on any given topic about which they happen to know very little, who often enjoy using the dictionary as a primary source of their reasoning, as if the entirety of a concept can be tied to its single sentence description and whether or not it is a noun. 

Still, it tends to be a generally accepted notion that the existence of a dictionary in the first place is commonly a symptom of an intelligent community, wherein there is cause for such an extent of nuanced communication that having even a brief sense of almost every word which might be uttered may be considered wise (and that having something rather heavy to throw at the speaker, upon discovering the word to be a tad rude, may be even wiser still). 

You will thus be very scarcely surprised to learn that hobbits had their own little dictionary, as did dwarves, as did men, and so too did elves (theirs often in excessive multivolumed multitudes). Orcs, on the other hand, had no such thing. It is therefore impossible to discover just exactly what their cultural notion of “peace” was, but were they ever to put its definition to paper it would very likely read the following: 

“Peace (noun)(pēs): the time interim to finding available things to kill, often very boring”

It is perhaps just as well that they did not have any sort of documentation of their foul language, however, for the things they often said – especially on the battlefield – could not possibly bear being written. 

This was, in fact, the thing Bilbo had forgotten most of all, as he once more visited in the land of the living the very place he had so often been reminded of in his dreams. War really was a frightfully loud occasion. All around him came the clashing of steel and the gnashing of teeth, as men and elves and dwarves and orcs alike cried out in such cacophonies of victory and pain that it was soon quite impossible to distinguish the one from the other. He had similarly forgotten the dreadful sogginess of it all, for even though the clouds above them had yet to make good on their threatening promise of rain, the ground below was still sodden with blood and sweat and the general sludge of horrid death. 

Even the overgrown hair on his head was damp, thanks to the vicious heat that gathered beneath his helmet. Balin had insisted he wear it – though this was only shortly after Thorin had become quite publicly irritated at the hobbit’s insistence that he be allowed on the battlefield in the first place. In truth, it must be noted that Bilbo was himself becoming rather thoroughly annoyed with the king, with all his apparent disbelief regarding the hobbit’s usefulness in such times of trouble. 

And if that damnable dwarf got himself killed now, before Bilbo ever got the chance to prove it to him… 

This was the very thought that spurred the little burglar into action, and so he abandoned his peevish fussing with the leather strap that dug insistently into his soft chin, instead finally daring to cast his eyes toward the horrible mayhem that surrounded him before leaping from his hiding place from behind a rock nearly as small and unnoticeable as he was and running into the loathsome fray. 

As he did so, he realized that his mithril shirt also rubbed aggravatingly at his armpit, in a way he had never noticed before. And for a long while, that was in fact all he noticed. He ducked beneath swinging scimitars, and weaved through great walloping maces as they were swung by orcs which were twice his size in both directions. He was scratched, and he sweated, and at one point it is quite possible he even screamed. But he chose to notice none of it, beyond the utterly unpardonable irritation of the way his shirt rubbed at his left-hand side just where it was most tender. 

War is always this way, you know – especially to those of us who were never meant to be there. It will be all, or it will be nothing, but it will not be reasonably reckoned with. 

And so, on and on the battle lasted, as the world beyond might have gone into another age entirely unnoticed by the lot of them. Empires may have risen only to fall, and children may have been born only to become parents themselves, and indeed rivers might have run from one direction to another until there was nothing left at the start of them to bother escaping from. And yet within these mere miles, where generations were ruined and lost by the minute in that tight knot of wretched chaos, not a moment seemed to pass. 

Still, the sun bore down hotter, until it was unimaginable that any greater heat could be created. And the ground became slicker, until there hardly any point in trying to stand on it unless your intention was only to fall. The stench became ranker and more putrid, until it seemed to burn the aching lungs of any who were still capable of gasping breath. 

Surely it would all end, soon? 

It didn’t, of course. War never does. 

Eventually though, where now the elves danced with deathly grace to flit amongst great hulking legions of orcs and goblins, there would be someone – weeks or even months later – who would wander slowly and dispassionately through the rubble to clear it all away. And down in Dale, where men with their spears and swords were torn straight through as boulders rained down heavily upon them from trebuchets far above, there would one day be someone who carefully dug up each cracked cobblestone at their feet and dutifully replaced it with a new one, so that the carriages containing their meager supplies could safely travel to their destination. It was an end to many things, this battle, just as unnecessarily as it was a beginning. But for the moment, it was also infinite. 

Even so, though the side of the mountain was ravaged by the many legions who now lived and died upon it, grass would grow there again one day. It is important that you remember that. 

Unfortunately, Bilbo, for his part, had quite forgotten the existence of grass at all, just as surely as he had now managed to forget his irritation with his armor, as well as the abstract reason he was even at war in the first place and was thereby obliged to wear it. And for a moment he even forgot his own name, so that when he heard it shouted from afar he did not turn immediately to notice it. 

“Bilbo!” cried a voice. “Bilbo, over here!” 

It was Fili, his wonderful blond hair now so streaked with mud and grime that you mightn’t have realized its color was anything but a horrible mix of grey and brown and red, had you not known him. But Bilbo recognized him just the same, when he finally discovered himself enough to respond. 

“Oh, Fili!” he shouted. “Oh thank goodness, you are still alive!” 

“Of course I am,” the young dwarf replied with a frail fraction of his usual cockiness – and as they drew closer to one another the battle raged onward, unwilling to wait for them, so that they were no longer at the center of it by the time they had reached each other. 

“But where are the others?” Bilbo asked. “Where is Thorin, and Kili, and all the rest?” 

“I cannot claim to know the fate of the lot of them,” Fili responded, after a brief pause in which he quickly dispatched of an orc that had foolishly wandered into their ken. “As for Kili, he is only a short distance off, making good use of his bow from higher ground. And as for Thorin, I cannot say. I was given charge of this section of the battlefield, but he and Dáin and Dwalin departed from it some time ago on their goats and boar to search for any sign of the survival of the pale orc.” 

“And you did not follow after them?” Bilbo asked incredulously – for the moment distracted even from the terrible news of their ill-fated departure by the utterly unlikely idea that Fili had done just exactly what he was told. 

“I should have liked to,” Fili admitted mournfully, “but I have been appointed commander of the armies of this area, and I cannot abandon my brothers-in-arms. Leadership is a great burden of responsibility, you understand.” 

He seemed, in all his pride, not to realize that he had been tricked into relative safety, as this part of the battle – truly terrible though it was – was yet still nowhere near to the very heart of it. But Bilbo was dedicated to the young lad’s safety, of course, and in fact was almost so to the great extent that Thorin himself was. And so he therefore rather wisely chose not to point this out. Instead he only gathered himself up, and thanked Fili for his helpfulness, and urged him to keep himself as safe as he was surely keeping his brother. And with little more time for anything else, the hobbit made off in the distant direction of Ravenhill. 

He had hoped that the likely death of the pale orc at the cruel hands of Smaug might have convinced Thorin to remain on the frontline – in fact he had even gone so far as to have felt relieved that, if nothing else, the dwarf he loved would never be so far away, and that even in the grand and terrible chaos of battle Bilbo could always reach him. 

He cursed himself for his ignorant assumption now, of course, just as thoroughly and emphatically as he cursed his own little legs for not bearing him more quickly through the violent disarray. 

The clanging and clashing continued all around him, but on and on he ran in spite of it all. Slipping through the gory mud, and sweating under the hostile sun, deaf to the gnashing and bashing and crying all around him, he sprinted on and on and onward still, toward a mountainous monolith that seemed to draw no closer. Until… 

“The eagles!” someone shouted, from afar. “The eagles have come!” 

Surely it was not so late as all that? How could they have arrived already, Bilbo wondered with no small amount of dread. He did not dare to think of what that might mean for his timeframe, nor where he had been when last they had appeared. There was nothing he could do but continue to run. 

And so run and run he did, even still, until there was little more than the earth as it pounded against his sore and heavy feet, and the air as it rushed into his lungs and never quite managed to fill them, and the battle – still, unavoidable and looming – at a muffled distance. 

After a few moments of this, even the stench faded. And the sun cooled and its rays softened. And the ground was scarcely significant beyond its use as a cushion for feet he could no longer feel at all. 

The whole world became only a distant point where Thorin was, and the unmissable battle that stood between them. 

And then, suddenly and startlingly, a pain sprung up like a weed among asphalt from the back of his head, where a rock – thrown terrible and true – struck him with cruel force. 

And then the battle was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As is my purview lately, I'm very sorry about being a bit late to post. Unfortunately I'm working two jobs and going to school full time, while trying to maintain the highest GPA I possibly can as an upper-level biology major so I can keep my scholarships and feel confident applying to masters programs in the nearish future. That plus general life and living makes it very hard to write and edit what's essentially a full novel-length chapter every week, but I promise it's not for a lack of wanting to. I have no plans to put this story on hiatus or drop it in any other way, I'm just updating a lot less frequently than I'd like.  
> Anyway, as always thank you to everyone who has been writing such kind comments! You are the wind beneath my wings, and whatnot and so forth.


	19. Chapter 19

There is an odd and somewhat startling moment which occurs in everyone’s life, wherein we are obliged to discover that people have continued to eat tomatoes. 

Your grandma always grew them, after all, and your every childhood summer was filled with the watery sweetness of imperfect perfection (which had invariably been plucked a day too soon, or three too late). And in the golden glow of youth, it must once have seemed obvious that there is no earthly reason why everything oughtn’t last forever. 

But then, of course, a new world called death is invented, and your grandmother has gone to live in it. And just as suddenly the tomatoes have stopped, and they are instead replaced with bundles of papery nonsense that are familiar in shape only, which taste quite nearly as good as the bag they now apparently come in. And all at once it seems almost unbearably unjust to consider the idea that anyone might ever eat a tomato again, when your grandma wasn’t there to grow them. But they do, and they always will, and with that realization the world quite suddenly becomes a slight fraction less kind than we had always hoped it to be. Had it been so caring - or at least half as fair – perhaps the tomatoes might have been lost, and our cheeks would remain almost permanently pinched-pink. 

Still, it is worth considering that we may be considered endlessly lucky to ever have been so loved at all. How blessed are we, to have lived in a world that has grandmothers in it. 

The place Bilbo Baggins woke to after his dreadful tumble on the battlefield was not the one his grandmother had gone to, but it was surely the one where her memory belonged. For as he opened his weary eyes, he discovered himself to be in the middle of a great green forest, where rivers beyond rivers with unknown source trickled persistently from atop the looming walls of a half-lit canyon. Here, every bird that called out from the cheery and shadowed trees just beyond was the very same little friend that had often perched at his windowsill to wake him on the unquantifiable summer mornings of his youth, when the days had stretched before him like endless paths without obstacle. The wind, too, carried with it the faint scent of oranges decorated with little pinpricks of clove, of the very sort he and his mother had always strung up on silky ribbons to hang in the kitchen after the first flakes of snow had arrived on their cozy Shire. Every tree was made for climbing, and the sun was sweet and mild, and the shadows stretched like warm toffee from where they pooled beneath the sturdy branches – long and thin and fathomless, in such an untangleable way that they obscured any idea of a world that was not the hall of memories where he found himself now. 

He stood, or perhaps he’d always been standing, and it was then that he noticed the cool and unhurried flow of water beneath his bare feet, where it trickled by in a multitude of intertwining streams that braided together and then apart in thin and ruffled ribbons before continuing on in their unknowable journey into the darkness just beyond. 

This, of course, revealed his location to him rather suddenly, for though his own world was just as beautiful in its own ways, it yet always had the decency to be practical in the way it went about it. 

“I suppose this is some far corner of Valinor, then?” he demanded rather confidently of no one in particular. “Water doesn’t behave like this where I’m from, you know. Usually it gathers together in a great big stream, or soaks into the ground, or… something of the sort. Who am I meant to be meeting with, anyway?”

He cast his eyes around, then, as if he expected an answer. 

“Well?” he continued, with dramatic impatience. “I was in the middle of something rather important, I’m sure you know…” 

This was, for all he knew, a rather grand stretch of a statement – as in truth he could not quite remember what it was he’d been interrupted in doing, or why it was he felt so unbearably anxious to be returned to it. 

Regardless, he received no answer, and he was quite nearly as unsurprised as he was annoyed by this development. 

“Where I’m from it’s also considered unbearably rude to have a guest over without greeting them properly!” he called out peevishly, though the sound of his small voice was rather quickly lost amongst the gently swaying trunks of enormous aspens and the towering cliffs of rock that stood stately and solemn just beyond. 

Somehow, though, an even quieter noise made its way to his straining ears from somewhere only slightly behind him – and with such crystalline clarity that there was to be no doubting just what it was. Someone was crying. 

Rather alarmed, Bilbo turned to examine the direction from whence it came, and he was startled to notice that in a small pool of silvery water – where surely there had not been anyone before – there sat a woman. He was further startled to realize that she wept rather profusely, to so great an extent that were the idea not utterly ridiculous it may almost have seemed that every trickling stream in the whole of this place might somehow have belonged to her. 

“Oh, dear me!” Bilbo exclaimed, all afluster. “I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to be so horrible and brash, I’ve just been having the most appallingly stressful and utterly ridiculous lifetime, and… Well, I do apologize for my rudeness. Are you quite alright?” 

He approached her slowly as he made his excuses, though to do so terrified him slightly, as he had no earthly idea how he might be able to console her. Still, she seemed so terribly distraught that to go without offering her aid in some useless form or another was almost unthinkable. 

As he grew nearer, though, he realized that she was not distraught at all. For as he came to understand her visage (which was both old and young, plain and fair, in that infuriating way he had by this point become used to from the Valar) he realized that while she grieved rather passionately – to be sure – she did not seem quite helpless to it. This was a distinction that had never occurred to him before, and as it did so he felt the familiar but rare sensation which had only visited upon him a handful of times before in his overly-long life, wherein something seemingly important locks into place, and the world becomes just the slightest bit more understandable. 

“Can I… is there anything I can do to help?” he asked after he had gotten as close to her as he felt was polite, given the fact that they were, after all, utter strangers to each other. 

“Funny,” she said, her words accompanied by the sudden presence of a warm and comforting breeze (which this time smelt of that peculiar and distinct scent that clings to your fingers after having soaked them in the wonderfully disordered process of eating a ripe nectarine). “I meant to ask you the very same question.” 

And oddly enough, it did seem to be genuinely funny to her in some strange way, for though her tears never stopped she smiled rather kindly at him, as if she expected that she ought to be the one to do the comforting in their curious situation. 

“Goodness no, I’m perfectly alright my dear,” Bilbo reassured her hurriedly. “But what of you? What has you so distressed?” 

She smiled again at his question, as if she found his kindness odd – and yet somehow, it did not occur to Bilbo that he ought to feel condescended to or embarrassed, for her smile was a rather lovely thing, and he was simply glad to have been the recipient of it. 

“You are as good-hearted as I have been told,” she said to him warmly, as another gust of citrus and spice and honeysuckle played merrily past him. “It would serve you well to cling to that, I think, in the days to come.” 

Bilbo, of course, hadn’t the slightest idea what she might mean by that, but he was by this point so used to the unusual and unhelpful behaviors of everyone who ought to assist him that he hardly batted an eye at it. Instead, he focused on the part of the sentence which he felt hinted at information of a significant deal more use. 

“Who has told you about me, then?” he asked, though he felt a bit rude at steering the conversation toward himself at such a time, even when she seemed so dreadfully disinterested in addressing the source of her melancholy. 

“Yavanna and Aulë, makers of yourself and your heart,” the woman explained, her tone endlessly but distinctly patient. “Olórin too, though you will know him as Gandalf, I believe. He is quite fond of you, and was fond of your young nephew Frodo when once he knew him.” 

“Gandalf knows you!” Bilbo huffed. “I ought to have suspected he had a greater sense of my headache than he was letting on.” 

“Just so, and yet not quite,” the woman continued warmly, though still her tears did not dry. “He knows a good deal, but he is not aware that he knows it, so you mustn’t blame him.” 

“I think I will anyway,” the hobbit grumbled, and he was relieved to see that the woman laughed at his joke, seeming not to take offense. “How is it, then, that y-”

“Our time together draws to an end,” she cut him off, looking suddenly urgent.

“What, already?” Bilbo demanded, rather annoyed that he was once again to be denied the chance to even ask the questions he so desperately wanted answers to. 

“Yes,” she said, looking almost regretful – and her eyes still continuously filled with fresh tears, though Bilbo now felt rather guiltily that he may be the cause of them. “Even now, you begin to wake. Your journey is not yet at an end, and there is much this world will require of you. Do not forget the kindness of your heart.” 

“No, no,” he replied hurriedly, “of course not. Is there anything else I should know? I’ve felt so dreadfully alone in all of this.” 

“Yes,” she said, and she paused for a nerve-wrackingly long moment to consider her response, much to the hobbit’s impatient dismay.

But finally, she arrived upon her reply – though it was, of course, as vague and impractical as Bilbo surely ought to have expected. 

“You must understand,” she said carefully, “that grief follows all that is good like a shadow, to such an extent that it may seem that happiness itself is only the cause of it. Yet you must consider that no gloom can ever outweigh the thing it seeks to obscure. It is, after all, better to find yourself in the dark foothills of a mountain than to consider a world where there are no mountains at all.” 

Ridiculous, Bilbo thought. Absolutely ridiculous. 

And with no more fanfare than that, he found himself once more thrust into the land of the living, where he was greeted by a pounding in his head, an aching in his bones, and the faint sound of someone in the distance desperately calling his name. 

****** 

For miles upon miles surrounding the Lonely Mountain there was a dust – drawn up from where now-ruined grass had once held it to the earth, and whipped by the wind of night – which drifted golden and sleepy through the first dawning day on what was now no longer a battlefield. This would have been utterly beautiful, were it not for the ungodly aroma that clung to the air upon which it danced with a sour tenacity. Battles are putrid affairs, after all, and are twice so where orcs are involved. 

Admittedly, the charm was similarly spoilt by the heavy presence of death, which still loomed watchful and dark over the breaking morn. Thorin, however, did his best not to notice it, as he limped further and further into the still and silent wreckage of what had once been the very same budding valley they had crossed on their ponies only those weeks ago, and thus farther and farther away from the hastily reconstructed tents where those who had survived went about the horrible business of treating each other’s wounds. 

It had, in the end, been a better war than the one they had once waged – not the least of his reason for thinking so being that Thorin and his nephews had managed to live to see the end of it at all. For this, he was enormously grateful (though it ought to be noted that Dwalin, trailing grumpily behind him, appeared not to believe any of his claims regarding such a sentiment). 

“Ye’ll tear yer frail elfin stitches, you blundering oaf,” he grumbled with rather plain annoyance from some distance away, where he too was looking for any sign of the hobbit. 

“And if I do, you’ll have your evidence that their remedies are not as hardy as our own, as you constantly love to complain,” Thorin called in distracted reply – his eyes never leaving the ground, where they searched amongst the piled bodies for the outline of one which might be heartbreakingly smaller than the rest. 

“I s’pose Fili proved himself to be rather kingly in battle,” came Dwalin’s acerbically shouted response. “Perhaps yer death wouldn’t be all that tragic. Embarrassing though, to bleed out on a battlefield after the excitement’s already over. Can’t imagine the ballads they’ll write about you.” 

“If I have any luck, any ballads will focus on Dáin’s rather more heroic encounter with Azog, and I’ll be revised down to little more than a stanza,” Thorin replied, in a manner he hoped did not entirely betray how poorly he was managing to regulate the growing fear that clutched desperately at his heart. 

Dwalin responded then – likely to say something critical of Thorin’s character, or about the relative worth of song itself, about both of which he often had much to criticize. But the king did not hear him, for he had spotted a small form whose dwarven armor had been run clean through by an enormous troll’s spear, and for one heart-wrenching moment he had been certain it was Bilbo. Upon having run to it on numb and shaking legs, however, he discovered that it was only one of the shorter soldiers from the Iron Hills, and he shook his head grimly to his now more pale-faced companion. 

After that, they searched in a silence interrupted only by their occasional cries of Bilbo’s name, which were met with no greater response than the gentle murmuring of the wind. They had little to go on, besides the last glimpse of him running further into the fray which Kili had caught from his high archer’s position. Still, they would not give up – nor could they, in all truth, for the loyalty of dwarrow is crafted quite as hardily and without flaw as are any other of their rarest and most greatly-cherished works. 

So on and on they searched, well after the dawn had fully broken and spilt its pink and friendly light onto the awaiting face of a warming earth, and never did they tire of their quest – even when all hope seemed to have long since been lost. 

And then, quite suddenly: 

“Here,” came a weak and quiet voice in response to one of Thorin’s ever-hoarser shouts. “I’m… here.” 

The king spun quickly on his injured leg – though the pain of doing so was quite lost beneath the sensation of his pounding heart as it leapt with such ferocity that it seemed almost to desire to escape from him entirely. Indeed, the rushing of frantic blood between his ears was nearly so terrible that it quite drowned out the very response they strained to hear, and he cursed himself as yet again he was victim to his own unrestrainable yearnings. 

Even so, the voice he was so desperate to catch the sound of called to him with a simple and finite clarity, frail and brittle though it was. 

“Thorin,” Bilbo nearly whispered, and it was then that his position became apparent. He was collapsed, half buried beneath a warg, the threatening position of which Thorin could not bear to consider. Far worse, however, was the dent in his sturdy dwarven helm, which suggested a terrible blow that would surely have been the end of their little burglar, were it not for the now-ruined armor he had been so luckily equipped with. 

“Bilbo,” Thorin whispered, as he fell painfully to his knees before his friend and carefully lifted his head (which was ever-so soft, in a way he had never quite noticed before) to remove his ruined helmet and examine for the familiar signs of lasting damage. The jostling movement – tenderly though it was enacted – seemed to pain Bilbo, as was indicated by the sharp and stuttering breaths he took in tandem with it, and Thorin was relieved to notice it even as he cringed with sympathy. Regrettable though it was, the distress indicated that he was capable of feeling anything at all, and with such injuries numbness was not to be considered a blessing. 

“You lived,” Bilbo whispered between shaking breaths, and he seemed enormously relieved through his deliriousness. 

“Yes, yes, I live,” Thorin reassured him, as he adjusted the hobbit so that his tender head was cradled comfortably on his own lap, as he waited for Dwalin’s approach. “The others too, though few without injury. Fili now sports a scar that he boasts is particularly handsome, and Kili is rather jealous.” 

“The battle is over, then?” Bilbo enquired weakly, appearing almost unable to believe it, and his eyes searched the sky distractedly as if the answers to his muddled questions might somehow be contained in their pale blue and unclouded expanses where carrion birds circled uncaringly overhead. 

“Yes, the battle is concluded, and we are victorious,” the king reassured him – and he raised a tentative hand, unsure of its welcome, the brush the errant strands of hair that clung to Bilbo’s sweating forehead away from where they threatened to block his view of the remaining world. 

“The pale orc?” Bilbo asked quickly, as he was wracked then by some unknown pain that caused his teeth to grit and his pallor to become further blanched and sickly. 

“Dead,” Thorin responded, with a definitive tone that offered him an odd and unexpected sense of relief even as he spoke. “Killed by Dáin, who even now is regarded as quite the hero for his bravery amongst the members of every race present. He is a skilled warrior, of course, and he brings honor to our family.” 

And in truth Thorin sincerely felt he did, though he was barely able to spare a thought to the notion that he might once have been rather enormously jealous that such an honor was to be bestowed on any head but his own. Yet where once he might have been inclined to think that it was in some way his right to exact revenge on the curse of his bloodline, he was now little more than relieved by the knowledge that the threat therein had been resolved, and he was instead far more interested in the approaching figure of Dwalin, as he made his way carefully – though not quite clumsily – across the lawless plains strewn with unearthed sagebrush and untended corpses. 

“Good,” Bilbo sighed with great relief, and it was only then that he closed his eyes to the world in some semblance of rest. 

Thorin rather assumed that he would go silent then, and he was quite nearly about to warn him against the temptation of sleep when the extent of his injury was not yet known, when instead the burglar continued to talk. 

“You came back for me,” he whispered – and though it was not truly a question, it was said with enough disbelief that it quite nearly ought to have been so. 

“Of course I did,” Thorin replied, as he threw what remained of his caution to the light and dust-ridden wind and placed a hand over the hobbit’s heart, so that he could be reassured of its continued efforts while they waited a moment longer. “As I told you when you played this trick once before, I have learned my lesson, and I will never again lose hope in your survival.” 

Bilbo smiled a tad dazedly at his saying so, and opened his eyes once more to stare out at the world that still waited for him to make his mark upon it. And in the silent remains of what had only hours before been a dark and dreadful battlefield, they shared in a moment of peace. 

******* 

The next time Bilbo regained his consciousness, it was to the noticeable absence of the dwarven king – and to a rather rude conk of a wizardly staff on his forehead, besides. 

“Ah, he wakes then, does he?” Radagast asked in a manner that was accusatory and rather apparently distracted in equal measure. Bilbo waited for a moment for the response of whomever it was the wizard was muttering to, before he realized that they were, in fact, entirely alone in a rather grand and comfortable elven tent, with no more company than was provided by the occasional shafts of light that played through the canvas doors as they were blown lazily open by an infrequent breeze. 

“Yes, he – I do,” Bilbo responded with a dry and cracking voice after a moment, deciding it might be rude to let the question go unanswered. 

“Quiet, you,” Radagast muttered, as he waved a dismissive hand in a direction which might be considered Bilbo’s own in only the vaguest of terms. Instead of making polite conversation, the old conjurer seemed rather taken with examining a mortar bowl full of loosely ground herbs, which he sniffed here and licked there until they were apparently deemed suitable enough for his patient – at which point he pinched them up with dirty fingers and placed them all at the bottom of a teacup, which was then abruptly filled with boiling water from an unseen and certainly magical source, and passed the entirety of its contents over to Bilbo without so much as an offer of a strainer to keep them from clogging his throat. 

Entirely used to such antics, the hobbit hardly batted an eye, except to nod in thanks as was custom in any scenario wherein tea was served (for he was, after all, a Baggins, as much as the current throbbing in his head rather made him wish he was nothing at all). And because it seemed the world was yet insistent that he continue to be an active participant in it, he would be damned before he shamed his parents in a situation where the matter of manners was so exceedingly obvious and inflexible, no matter how little his host might appreciate his efforts to that very end.

“Ah, he wakes then,” came another voice – this time belonging to Gandalf, who although not particularly tall was forced to duck as he entered through the intricately-stitched canvas threshold, in order to accommodate the size of his ridiculous hat. Somehow, in spite of everything that had yet occurred and everything that still further threatened to, the wizard was quite as cheery and unrestrainable as the very sunlight that followed him into the makeshift quarters, and he observed Bilbo with a twinkle in his eye that might have somehow suggested that there was nothing on earth to trouble him from that point forward save the decision of what sort of pipeweed to smoke, and with whom. 

Perhaps it was only the questionable tea – which was suspiciously delicious, in a piney and earthen and pepperminted sort of way – but Bilbo was rather uncharacteristically comforted by the face of his friend’s ridiculous good temper, which was insistently present even on the brink of great peril. Indeed he was almost startled to realize that he was in some way relieved to see the wizard, and to know that his friend was there to aid in whatever odd way he might illogically decide was most helpful. Of course, he said nothing of the sort of this to Gandalf himself, but given that the size of the fellow’s smile only redoubled at his reluctant eye contact he rather suspected the doddering old sod had managed to figure it out anyway. 

“Well then, Master Baggins, I see you have yet again decided to rejoin us in the land of the living,” Gandalf said, in a way which suggested he felt his little joke was rather enormously clever. 

“Never by choice, I can assure you,” Bilbo grumbled. “How long was I out? No, wait… More importantly, why?” 

“You don’t remember then?” Gandalf asked, as he shared a moment of eye contact with Radagast – who yet still tottered about mixing this thing with that – and thus Bilbo suspected that some sort of informal examination of his person had been abruptly begun.

“Yes, yes, what do you remember?” the brown wizard demanded, as if the question had not been implied quite thoroughly enough. 

“Well, I…” Bilbo began, quite before he had actually arranged his thoughts enough to call upon them. “I remember that we took Erebor from the dragon, a second time,” he said, after a moment. “And that I stole the Arkenstone once more…. And that… Oh dear,” he began to blush, as he remembered the events that had followed after. 

“Indeed,” Gandalf responded primly, without bothering to hide his utterly infuriating amusement. 

“Well, after… all that,” Bilbo continued, “I remember that the battle was upon us, and then I believe I encountered Fili, and… Oh goodness, the battle. Oh, I was terribly worried about Thorin, when I saw the eagles had come! I lost track of time, and I simply couldn’t believe it! Is he alive? And Fili and Kili, are they-”

“Peace, Bilbo,” Gandalf reassured him, with such an extraordinary sense of calm that it was quite impossible not to take faith in it somehow. “They all live, and will be perfectly well, given time to heal.” 

“Not that they bother to allow themselves any,” Radagast muttered darkly, as he moved on to fuss about with some odd and foreboding combination of boiling and slightly-sulfurous substances at a table only a short distance from them. 

“Quite,” Gandalf agreed, with an apparent exasperation that needed no explaining. “The others of your troupe are in similarly good health, though they were all rather worried about you.” 

“Me?” Bilbo wondered. “Whatever for?” 

“Well, when the battle was won and the living were being accounted for, they noticed rather quickly that you did not number among them,” Gandalf replied plainly, as he availed himself to a seat by Bilbo’s bedside and prepared a saucer and cup of his own, which he began to sip away at with apparently little concern as to what unaccountable accoutrements were included in the odd blend. 

“I didn’t?” Bilbo asked, though this made an enormous amount of sense, given that he couldn’t remember just how it was he’d ended up alone in such an odd and stately tent, and with such a grand headache. 

“No, you did not,” Gandalf affirmed. “At first it was suspected that you were only lost amid the chaos of such an enormous endeavor, and messages were spread throughout the encampments of the men and elves that you were to be sent at once to visit the dwarves of Erebor and reassure them personally of your survival. But after a few hours, it became rather clear that you had not been seen, and the excitement of this revelation was not helped in the least by the King Under the Mountain having finally awoken in quite an ill temper-”

“Thorin was unconscious?” Bilbo interrupted to demand.

“Yes, yes,” Gandalf elaborated, clearly annoyed at the interjection (though the hobbit cared not a mite for his mood when such critical information was clearly at hand). “He was injured in battle as he searched for Azog, and his ailments were not particularly aided by the confrontation that followed at his actually having discovered him. He will be perfectly well, in the end, as I have already reassured you,” the wizard added quickly, as if anticipating further interruption. “But he received a rather impressive wound on his leg, and was briefly made unconscious when it was healed by Thranduil himself.” 

“Thranduil healed him?” Bilbo nearly cried out in what might have been joy at such a monumental moment of diplomacy, had his tone not been so colored by pure and simple shock. 

“Indeed,” his friend affirmed. “And he seemed quite nearly happy to do it, even. No doubt the elvenking has come to the conclusion that Erebor is likely to be renewed to all of its former glory, and with plenty more besides. I am not naïve enough to consider the act one borne of friendship, but allyship in such times as these may be of quite enough use on its own. He even returned Orcrist in a rather significant gesture of goodwill, though notably this was done after the delivery of a certain set of white gems was promised in writing to be fulfilled within a fortnight.” Gandalf mused, almost absentmindedly. 

“Still, it’s very possible that the entirety of these overtures will be overturned,” he continued on, with abruptly renewed cheer, “given how enormously annoyed the elvenking was to discover that Thorin – upon learning that you were nowhere to be found – went out looking for you himself, to the detriment of much of his healing handiwork.” 

“He did what?” Bilbo blustered with an almost resigned annoyance. “That absolute fool, I… Oh, I do believe I remember that now, at least a tad. Though at the time I felt certain I was only dreaming.” 

“Hardly,” Gandalf replied, still seeming enormously amused by something or another. “In fact, he insisted on carrying you back himself, and though you are not particularly large by any unit of measurement – even a dwarven one – this was still no small feat in his condition. Óin was, of course, extensively annoyed with him for it, and poor young Ori was nearly in tears to see you so still and unwakeable.” 

“Tears…” Bilbo mused, as he suddenly became aware that there was still something he could not entirely recall – something which was surely, and rather aggravatingly, somehow important, though he hadn’t the foggiest idea what it was that made it so. 

“Yes, well, you know how young ones are. Always prone to a bit of weepiness, especially those as sensitive as the Ri brothers. This display got Dori a tad misty-eyed, of course, and thus Nori was set off…” Gandalf rambled on.

“Tears!” Bilbo then exclaimed, suddenly remembering what it was that escaped him. 

“Yes, my dear fellow,” Gandalf responded placatingly, his tone as he did so falling to rest at some aggravating point between soothing and patronizing. 

“No, no,” Bilbo waved his free hand with a certain extent of annoyance at being so condescended to. “Tears, that’s important. While I was unconscious I met a woman, and though she was rather lovely to talk to she cried almost unceasingly. Would you happen to know anything about her?” 

Gandalf, for his part, looked rather inordinately shocked at the hobbit’s revelation – and was indeed quite enough so that his tea might have gone cold in all his mental dithering, were he not a notably mystical sort, and thus capable of reconjuring the heat. Even so, Bilbo quite nearly nodded off again, exhausted as he was, before his companion was capable of responding to what he had anticipated to be a rather normal inquiry. 

“You say she wept, and without stopping?” Gandalf asked him at last, and Bilbo was quite polite enough to only nod in affirmation, though privately he felt he had been perfectly clear about that point from the very start. “Why then, it could only have been her,” the wizard continued, with an uncharacteristic air of unmasked surprise. “That, my friend, was Nienna. She is a member of the Valar, of course, and is more importantly my patron.” 

“Your patron?” Bilbo wondered, his interest in the subject somewhat reinvested. “However do you mean?” 

“Exactly what I say,” Gandalf clarified rather unhelpfully, as he was ever wont to do. “Or perhaps tutor is a more apt word, in your tongue. Regardless, I learned everything I know from her, and she is thus rather responsible for me, for better or for worse… What is it that she said to you, then?” 

“Oh, very little of any help, which I imagine is a trait you studied in her apprenticeship,” Bilbo grumbled. “She mentioned something or another about Yavanna and Aulë, and referred to them as the makers of myself and my heart, which has begun to become a rather tired metaphor in my mind. She also mentioned that you were somewhat fond of me, and that you weren’t to be blamed for being so poor in advice because you did not yet know that you know what you need to.” 

The wizard harrumphed twice at his final sentence – and quite inevitably decided that tea was not nearly a strong enough stimulant for such a scintillating subject, whereupon he removed his trusty pipe from whatever unknown pocket he had always employed to keep it hidden and safe within one of the enormous sleeves of his robe. At which point it was, of course, filled right to the brim with a particularly aromatic blend, at almost the instant he began to chew absentmindedly upon its stem. 

“Odd, and yet still getting odder…” he murmured, as he began to tap away at his chin with the mouthpiece of it in a grand performance of some great thought. 

“Well then, what does it all mean?” Bilbo demanded – for although he knew quite well that he had only just repeated the notion that it was advisable not to expect any answers from his friend at all, he still wanted them rather badly.

Even so, Gandalf – being a wizard – was quite incapable of letting an opening assert itself in a conversation without immediately obliging himself to fill it, and thus he did indeed respond after a moment of further thought. 

“I believe I may have a theory with regards to your situation, my friend,” the old conjurer said. “Or at the very least, a speculation. Perhaps even a hypothesis, if you will permit me… Yes, I do believe I have an impression of your position, at long last.” 

“Well?” cried Bilbo. “Out with it!” For he was, after all, rather exasperated with the exhaustion of not knowing, and we ought not blame him for it.

“Yes, yes, my dear fellow, get ahold of yourself,” Gandalf demanded tersely. “All in good time. Your explanation is this: 

“The Valar, as you know, are rather fond of meddling in your world, and are rarely inclined to find value in the parts of it which you might consider the most sacred and inviolable. Furthermore, they rather enjoy a good laugh, and some of them have a certain propensity for becoming almost ridiculously romantic about the simplest of things… In your case, I believe that Yavanna and Aulë may have become somehow bored, or were perhaps inclined to challenge each other for one reason or another. Regardless, I feel nearly confident in saying that the well-trodden metaphor that so exasperates you is no metaphor at all. I cannot claim to understand how it is that soulmates are made, nor whether this is always the case for the dwarrow and their Ones, but I do believe that when your maker created you she carved out your heart and traded it for one of her husband’s own creation, and thus did Aulë do the same for Thorin. Your heart is quite literally not your own, if I am right in this. It truly does belong to the one you love. 

“Oh!” he continued on, in great delight at a further detail as it suddenly locked into place. “This certainly does explain your mentioning that the Lady Galadriel seemed wise to your predicament, for she is the pupil of them both, and makes great efforts in correspondence, to which I am almost unceasingly compared and found wanting.” 

“But then why did I meet with this woman who weeps? What does your tutor want with me, unless it is to tell you that you ought to write more?” Bilbo asked, for he was quite shocked enough that he could not possibly arrange his thoughts in any semblance of order, and thus what questions occurred to him came of their own accord. 

“Her name is Nienna, I think you will recall,” Gandalf corrected him firmly. “And I imagine it is precisely because she weeps that you were called to visit her at all. She is known for many things, in the distant west, but above all it is she who turns grief into wisdom. You, my dear friend, are therefore more qualified to appreciate her judgment than most. Indeed, I nearly suspect that while the initial conceit of your commencing creation was of course formed by Yavanna and Aulë, it was instead she who is responsible for its repetition, for she is rather passionately opposed to injustice in all forms great and small, and I cannot imagine she could bear to have seen your stolen heart suffer so, that first time round. Indeed, I might even have known this, if only she had counseled with me and advised me of your hardships.” 

At this point, the wizard was quite nearly grumbling, and Bilbo – being no further enlightened as to just what he ought to be wondering, aside from the sense that there was a good deal there to wonder at – decided rather astutely that a slight redirection might be in order. 

“But did you not tell me, only a day ago, that it was as likely as anything else that the entirety of this earth revolved around a tadpole, or something equally odd?” he asked, finally. 

This reminder seemed to calm Gandalf somewhat, and he returned to puffing away at his pipe with great contentment at once, as if satisfied with the very notion. 

“Ah, yes,” he affirmed. “It very well may be.” 

“Well then,” the hobbit responded, as he felt himself similarly relaxing. “That is indeed a fine thing. I’d prefer not to be a hero in any sort of story that is not penned of my own conjuring, for I suspect I am not cut out for it in the least.” 

“Ah,” Gandalf began, in that tone of voice he always took when he felt he was about to say something exceedingly wise. “Heroes are an exceedingly rare breed, Bilbo Baggins, and anyone who considers himself one is surely mistaken. It would therefore seem that if nothing else, you are on the right track.”

“I suppose,” Bilbo granted him, though he was very little convinced. “Still, heroes are meant to be brave, after all, and I am hardly ever that. I’m much more commonly frightened, quite nearly of everything.” 

“Perhaps,” Gandalf countered, “but you must know that bravery without fear is merely foolishness.” 

The burglar pondered his statement for a moment, as he decided whether or not it was half as astute as its clever phrasing might suggest. 

“You know,” he replied at long last, when he found himself wholly unable to make up his mind. “Sometimes I feel that conversation with you is quite nearly as productive as throwing a book of proverbs against a wall and checking to see which page it has landed upon.” 

At this Radagast chortled rather merrily from where he continued to fuss about, nearly forgotten, in the corner. Whereas Gandalf did not, and instead he elected to huff an extent of exasperated air from his nose, before pretending there was nothing to interest him in his immediate vicinity aside from the glowing of his pipe as its bowl crackled with his every inhalation. 

“How confident are you in your theory, then?” Bilbo asked at length, for he was at this point very familiar with the customs of sorcerers, and was thus wise to the notion that in their minds the distance between speculation and fact was one which may be bridged solely by confidence. 

“As ever, my dear fellow, I say what I mean, and I mean much more than I say,” Gandalf replied sagely – though the twinkle in his eye was sufficient in indicating that he suspected the source of Bilbo’s wariness, and that he found no fault with it. 

“Oh do speak plainly, Gandalf.” Bilbo griped (for he had surely reached the end of both his tea and his patience, and as you will likely know, dear reader, one cannot possibly be refilled without the other). “It’s a lovely notion, to think that Thorin and I are somehow destined for each other, but it defies belief just as thoroughly as it does logic. He as much as told me, once, that he had already met and lost his One long before the idea of my even being born had occurred to the world-”

“Yes, that is an interesting thing…” Gandalf interrupted him with his directionless musing. “I cannot account for his claims there, although I have begun to gather my own suspicions. Still, they do little to sway my verdict in this matter, and perhaps they only encourage it. I have wandered and traversed this wonderful earth of yours for nearly as long as it has been a place which might be wandered at all, and in all my time of doing so my primary purpose has only ever been to observe without interference.”

At this allegation, Radagast once more made his presence known with a loud and unapologetically rude snort – though again he scarcely looked in their direction, enraptured as he so apparently was with unrolling a large spool of bandaging cloth for the sole and inexplicable purpose of winding it around a bobbin that was quite nearly identical to the one it had already come on. 

“My point, if I am permitted to make it,” Gandalf continued, with a restrained sniff, “is that I have been witness to a great many things which occur in this world, as well as a good deal more which oughtn’t have. You must therefore understand that my judgment is not reasonless, nor is it hastily given. Even so, I am quite confident in saying that I have not seen such an infuriatingly obvious duo as the likes of you two since the Second Age, when Celebrimbor and that dwarven fellow of his…”

“Narvi,” Bilbo interjected, resigned to the repeated comparison. “Elrond told me the story himself, so you oughtn’t trouble yourself with repeating it.” 

“Did he now?” Gandalf exclaimed, seeming greatly amused by the information. “Well then, my point is only further grounded. The Lord of Rivendell is exceedingly wise, quite nearly to a fault, and he scarcely says anything that he does not find truly important. He would not make such an example lightly.” 

“I suppose,” Bilbo allowed (though in truth his purpose in doing so was only to end their discussion of a subject he found so dreadfully fraught and thoroughly bleak.) “Still, you mustn’t think that I have not noticed your circumvention of my question, my friend. Just how confident are you in your theory? Is it the truth?” 

“You accuse me of evading your inquiry, and yet you present me with two queries cut from wholly different cloth,” the wizard countered. “Regarding my confidence in my own speculations, you may rest assured that I have nothing but the greatest of regard for them. I am quite sure that I am right in some great part, though perhaps not entirely.” 

He paused to contemplate his own words then, as he took a slow and deliberate sip of his still piping-hot tea (which only served to aggravatingly remind Bilbo of his own rather empty cup). 

“But is it the truth?” the hobbit demanded, before clearing his throat with a rather obvious glance toward his saucer. 

“Oh, not in the least my dear fellow,” Gandalf replied cheerily, as at last he took the hardly-veiled hint and poured his bedridden companion a second serving. “In fact, it likely bears so little resemblance to the truth that to point out the falsehoods in my story would take twice as long as it did for me to tell it to you in the first place. You must understand, the Valar do not deal in concepts that are within your comprehension, and indeed they are only occasionally within mine. But my explanation was in the same general spirit of the truth, and to tell it to you outright would do you very few favors anyway, for you’d have no hope of understanding it at all.” 

“So it’s a lie then?” Bilbo huffed, with such tremendous force that the gentle steam which rose from the warm draught in his hands was compelled to dance and twirl to avoid his exasperated exhalation. 

“I suppose it is, in a way,” his friend replied good-naturedly, as if he saw no problem with the idea. “Did it help?”

“A bit,” the hobbit conceded, though his grand capacity for annoyance had been scarcely abated. “Thank you.” 

And perhaps it had, even, for dear Bilbo had been alive for quite long enough to understand that this world is not one which might be understood by hoping to discover all of its many and varying answers. Instead, he knew, it is often enough the case that the most one can hope for is to unveil the right sorts of questions. 

Inordinately old as he was, however, he even still did not quite appreciate the sheer veracity of truth which waited comfortably beyond the conceit that truth itself was oh-so important. It is undoubtedly critical that we who yet live ask as many questions as we can manage, for the search for answers is often twice as spectacular as the little facts which such quests might reveal. Even so, it is quite frequently the case that our examinations of the earth may cause us to become quite blinded to the fact that we are living upon it in the first place. 

For he had, after all, awoken once more to a world filled with such wonderful complexity that he could not possibly hope to tire of its secrets were he to be provided a dozen lifetimes beyond his own with which to discover them. And perhaps even better, though similarly forgotten in value, he had woken to the quick companionship of one of his dearest friends. Even then, he held in his hand a warm and delicious cup of something or another, and he sat more or less comfortably abed in a place where the wroth and ruin of dragonfire had not nearly exterminated the sheer force of life that thrummed from within it. Pale green and bleached white grass yet shot from beneath its surface in patternless patches, to the great annoyance of the elves who had struggled to pitch their splendid tents on its inconsistent terrain, and its simple presence was a message of mercy which was quite nearly enough to redeem the great and terrible things that had occurred in this place in the relatively short time it had existed at all. 

And amidst all of this, still, only a short distance from him there were a great many friends who loved him dearly, and who waited with great impatience for news of his health. Tomatoes still grew in family gardens far and wide, and he had once been so very blessed to have had a grandmother. 

And far, far away, in the wonderful and distant plains which lie west of the West, a woman looked out at the walls of the world, and she knew of his suffering as if it were her own, and for his sake as much as any other’s she wept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you to everyone who has been following this fic so dedicatedly, and sorry I can't update more frequently! On the positive side though, what took me so long here was that I had finals for the summer semester, and despite the fact that I was in a few notorious culling classes for my major (which are designed to make a significant amount of the class fail to thin out the graduating group) I managed to end up with a 4.0! I'm very proud, but it was a LOT of work. 
> 
> I also quickly want to note that if any of you are thinking that 140,000 words of slow burn is a lot.... you're right. I definitely didn't go into this planning on passing the word count for The Hobbit, much less for The Return of the King, but I'm apparently much more verbose than I anticipated. That said, I'm not just dragging things out cause I love a good slow burn (although I do). This just actually feels like the narrative path that makes the most sense to my reading of canon. We already know that the ring had an enormous impact on Bilbo by the end of his (first) life, and we also know that it weighed on Frodo to such an extent that it made him distrust Sam (who is as unquestionably loyal as you can get). Bilbo loves and trusts Thorin too, when he’s in his right mind, but taking the version of Bilbo we know from the end of LOTR and pairing him with Thorin from the end of the Hobbit means that both of them are in a much worse position than Frodo and Sam when it comes to having faith in each other. I hope that’s clear in the storytelling, I don’t want you all thinking I’m just stringing you along because I enjoy writing miscommunication and angst for chapters at a time. I also want to smash their heads together, but they WILL actually get there....
> 
> Anyway, that's enough of that. Have a good week, I'll update again as soon as I'm able!


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